I heard a story the other week about a tour bus in Iceland with a lost traveler. It captured me deeply, in a way that I won’t claim to understand. It had a conversation with my soul.

The story is strange. In its most literal sense, it is not particularly beautiful. There is no inherent lesson. But it is ripe for interpretation.

It goes like this.

There was a tour bus travelling through Iceland. It made a stop near a volcano that also happened to be next to a shopping center. The travelers were allotted a few hours to explore the area.

During the excursion, one of the non-English-speaking travelers, previously dressed in all green, purchased a new purple outfit and changed into it. She did not think much of this wardrobe switch.

When everyone was getting back on the bus, one of the travelers noticed that “the woman dressed in green” was nowhere to be seen. They called out over the intercom, asking her to come forward, but no one budged.

Because of the language barrier, the woman who had changed outfits did not understand she was the one being summoned. Everyone on the bus checked the rows behind them and in front of them, but no one saw a woman dressed in green.

Over the course of the next few hours, the search escalated from a casual gander around the grounds to a full-blown, coastguard-led search for the lost traveler. Hundreds more people and several helicopters got involved.

Among the hundreds of people searching for the missing traveler was, of course, the “missing” traveler.

Several hours later, at around 3:00am, through some series of events, the lost traveler finally realized that she was in fact the one everyone was searching for.

She had spent the better part of the last day engaged in a search for…well…herself.

This story begs several questions—questions that probably wouldn’t occur (or matter) to most people. But as people like to tell me, I’m not like most people.

Among these questions are the following:

• Was the search “successful”?
• Can you find something that was never lost?
• Are there any patterns in our lives that mirror this search?
• Should adult tour buses use count-off systems?

I will attempt to answer some of these.

Here’s how I see it. The lost traveler was attempting to solve a problem that never actually existed. She was inducted into a search—the nature of which she did not truly understand. Ultimately, her only chance of “success” lay in rejecting the underlying premise of her existing search. To declare that she was never, in fact, lost in the first place and to subsequently terminate the search she was engaged in and pivot to a different search in which she reserved the possibility of success.

I think one of the reasons that this story captures me so deeply is that it reminds me of how I and many people I know have generally lived our lives to date. It is not an unfamiliar pattern, but this story highlights its absurdity.

Many of us find ourselves being inducted into “searches” by a combination of biology and culture—searches in which we have little to no chance of success.

We seek lasting happiness with a mind carefully designed not to be content for extended periods of time. We do so within a culture that funnels us toward the ruthless pursuit of more. More money. More beauty. More status. More fame. More [lots of other things that we don’t need in order to be happy beyond some base level that is much lower than many of us care to admit to ourselves].

Our biology and culture usher us onto the hedonic treadmill. It is easy to spend our entire lives there, engaged in the pursuit of more, all under the implicit (but often explicit) assumption that once we attain more of the thing we have been chasing, we will finally be happy.

But as the saying goes, you can never get enough of what you don’t need.

Whether or not we care to admit it, this is how many of us choose to spend our lives.