This week in my course called Madness in Literature, we read a great short story, “The Happiness Machine” by the American writer Ray Bradbury. The story imagines what it would be like if we could create a machine or technology that would make us completely happy. While we have not yet invented a machine as Bradbury imagines in his story, we have never given up trying.

In our current time and culture, one of the primary ways we try to create happiness is through consumerism. We often (I include myself here) imagine that we will be happier with the purchase of some new technological gadget, nicer car, new shoes,or larger TV. One of the things I have noticed about myself when I have lived overseas is that I want so much less, and less often.

With my children as well, when we have moved to another country for a time, their wants diminish significantly. For example, some years ago my children started the common conversation that every parent deals with in our era: “ALL my friends have an iPhone, I am the only one who doesn’t have one!” Then we moved our family to India in 2012-2013, and almost immediately those conversations stopped. They saw so many happy people with so much less, and they just forgot that they wanted so many things.

American companies know this about us and feed us this idea constantly through advertising. In much of the advertising we experience in TV, radio and internet media, we are told that we will be handsome, happy and have loads of friends if we just have this new thing. It feeds our idea that buying things is a happiness machine. But we also know how fleeting this machine is in our lives. The feeling fades, the glow of a new purchase wears off quickly. At some point we realize the machine doesn’t work!

Another supposed happiness machine cuts closer to home for me professionally. Psychology has been selling the psychological happiness machine for decades. Psychologists and drug companies have sold us on the idea that we are entitled to a constant flow of happiness, and that any unhappiness in our lives is a sign of pathology.

The newest version of the diagnostic manual used in psychology and psychiatry made a dramatic change in how we diagnose depression. In previous versions, the diagnosis of depression had a caveat, often referred to as the bereavement exclusion. This meant that if someone was grieving the death of a loved one, they couldn’t be diagnosed with depression for at least a month. In the recent version of the manual, the bereavement exclusion was removed. This means that psychology and psychiatry no longer see mourning the death of a loved one as a legitimate reason for unhappiness.

Through this kind of thinking and diagnosing, psychology promises that it has a happiness machine made up of psychotropic drugs like antidepressants and antianxiety medications. The number of people on antidepressants alone has skyrocketed over the past couple of decades, reaching now 13 percent of the adult population and 17 percent of all adult women. Just like in Bradbury’s story, we are seeking to find some kind of fix to the struggles of the human condition — a technology that will take away our struggles and suffering.

In the end of Bradbury’s short story, Leo, the builder of the happiness machine, finally understands as he watches his machine catch fire and burn from overuse. He had spent countless hours in his garage, engineering and building this machine that promised freedom from suffering. All the while his children were going without a father in their lives and his wife struggled to continue to take care of the needs of the family. At last, Leo sees the reality, that there was already a happiness machine, “patented a couple thousand years ago. It still runs; not good all the time, no! but it runs. It’s been here all along.”

He looks in the window of his home, at each of his children playing, creating, helping. He sees his wife quietly serving her family. “‘Sure,’ he murmured, ‘there it is.’ And he watched with now gentle sorrow, and now quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits, the pieces of this house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again.” Later, his friends and father saw him back inside his home, “tinkering, make a minor adjustment here, eliminate friction there, busy among all those warm, wonderful, infinitely delicate, forever mysterious and ever-moving parts.”

This is the secret — there is a happiness machine. It is not anything you can buy, build, or take in pill form. The real happiness machine is found in our close relationships, doing the little good we can do here and there. It is found in the moment we take with a child who wants our undivided attention and in the neighbor who needs a kind word and warm meal. Let the other, false happiness machines burn, and engage back into your relationships, healing and forgiving, loving and serving.

Matthew Whoolery holds a doctorate in psychology and is an instructor at Brigham Young University-Idaho. He can be reached by email at drwhoolery@gmail.com.