50. The One Thing I Know About Happiness

Blog number 50, woo!

And with it being Blog 50, I thought we could chat about a fairly hefty subject: Happiness.

Or at least a tiny element of what is a far too vast, complex and nuanced topic to cover in 5 minutes.

Being content with life is something that I imagine most of us want. It’s often the leading metric for evaluating our, and other people’s, lives.

We’ve all done it. We see someone who’s rich, in shape, and supposedly thriving in life and ask “well are they happy?”

Though we rarely see someone who’s happy and ask “well are they rich?”

All other life metrics pretty much dissipate if someone’s genuinely having a good time.

I’m sure we’ve all heard the stories of those isolated tribes in some remote place in the Amazon who essentially have nothing, but report huge levels of life satisfaction.

In contrast, we look on with envy, as despite (or maybe because of…) having way more stuff than these people, we tend to be far less content.

Feeling content is a strange one, as it’s something that individually, only we really know if we are or not.

It’s fairly easy to see if someone’s physically fit, or smashing it professionally, or doing well financially, or the likes - but it’s hard to tell how they’re genuinely feeling.

And the framework that we often use to assess this, Instagram, doesn’t tend to be the most reliable of evaluation methods.

If anything, as Social Media can be the main window through which most people we know see our lives, it can be tempting to prioritise giving off the impression that we’re all good, over actually genuinely being so. And how counterproductive that can be.

The whole “it doesn’t matter if my life sucks, as long as it looks good on Instagram” is kinda like the modern day equivalent of the sad clown paradox (i.e. the seemingly contradictory link between humour and mental struggles).

It can often be the people we’d least expect who are the ones who struggle the most. A long and deep enough conversation with such people is usually evidence of that.

Though any depressive predispositions aside, more broadly, struggle and extended periods of sadness just seem to be part of the parcel of being a human.

As a completely theoretical case to demonstrate the point, let’s take the hypothetically luckiest and healthiest person in the world.

To go on the slightly blunt and morbid side for a sec, well, everyone around them is eventually going to go through a host of traumatic events, get ill, and die (sorry).

So even if someone does hit the genetic, circumstantial, and general life jackpot, their life is going to be fucked for large parts.

Diving deeper into a more day-to-day point of view, as the luckiest person in the world, let’s say they had the best life set up across the board. You name it, they have it. Job, relationships, hobbies, health, the lot.

Well, their life would still be a bit of a mission, as the better those things are, the harder (and therefore more stressful) they can be to maintain.

I imagine this is probably something that we can all resonate with: the better we get at something, the more effort we need to put in to sustain it.

I think this principle applies to all areas of life (from our careers to our hobbies, and from our fitness to our wider life skills).

As an example to demonstrate a wider point, let’s take a 5km run.

We don’t run a sub-20 minute 5km, and then we’ve “completed it mate”.

If anything, that’s the easy bit.

The maintenance of that level is where the real slog begins. And it only ever seems to be maintained from the unglamorous grind of turning up day in day out and putting a shift in.

We don’t just reach the promised land of a goal that we said would make us happy and achieve eternal bliss. We get there, and after a momentary spike, we have to go again.

And it’s in this point where I think we find one of life’s greatest illusions: Once I do X, then I’ll be happy.

• £X more on my salary and I’ll be happy

• X more kilos lost and I’ll be happy

• X more followers or likes and I’ll be happy

As I’m sure we’ve all experienced, it doesn’t tend to work like that.

We’ve all achieved things in life that we said would make us happy.

Though we do/get/achieve X and it’s great, and then X simply changes.

We adapt to our new circumstances, and before we know it (or upload it to Strava), we want more.

What seemed impressive to our former selves, now just becomes the new benchmark.

Analogously, it’s almost like saying “once I take a shower, I’ll be clean forever”. Obviously we will be for a bit, but it won’t be long until we’re minging again.

Perhaps this constant moving of the goalposts (or the shower curtains) is a good thing.

It keeps us moving forward. And also, it’s slightly tragic when we hear someone repeatedly boast about past glories.

(Completely unrelated side note, did I tell you that I ran the London Marathon 2 years ago!?)

If these goalposts are always moving, and we’ve constantly got our eyes on the next thing, I suppose there’s a pretty obvious reflection here.

Can we enjoy doing the thing, as opposed to just having/achieving the thing?

As we spend the vast majority of our lives in that first bit, I imagine it’s probably good if we can manage to find a degree of enjoyment in it.

I guess it’s Arthur Conan Doyle’s idea that “the work is its own reward”. Or, dare we bring it up, the whole journey vs the dest… no, I can’t bring myself to write it.

This approach doesn’t just logically make sense, but the science behind it is fairly sound, and fairly simple, too. (Which is good, as simple science is basically the only science I understand).

In short, our dopaminergic system gets driven not by pleasure itself, but by the

expectation of pleasure.

This is why the thought of something can often be better than the actual thing.

For example, let’s take a weekend where we have no plans. In the week leading up to it, we can build it up to be this Utopian Chillfest.

Though we get to the weekend, and instead of it being the Relaxathon 4000 that we had anticipated, we end up a bit bored, lonely and irritable. Not quite as relaxing as we’d expected, and our dopamine signalling drops accordingly. As Robert Sapolski says "Dopamine is not about the pursuit of happiness, it is about the happiness of pursuit.” Ooosh!

As someone who’s prone to feeling a bit sad, I thought it was apt to celebrate hitting Blog 50 by reflecting on a few of life’s emotional trappings.

Naturally, this is by no stretch an exhaustive list, but I have found a couple of the above points to have been pretty useful when it comes to offsetting some of that (annoyingly frequently occurring) negative emotion.

A big thank you for reading, and here’s to the next 50 🍻