“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

When people consider making big changes in life—moving cities, changing careers, leaving relationships, quitting jobs they didn’t much like—they’re usually motivated by one common desire. Upheaval can be worthwhile if it leaves the past behind and creates a future that is happier and more promising.

But abandoning the past and building a better future is harder than it sounds. “At home I dream that at Naples … I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness,” Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance” in 1841. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and