I’m Grateful for What This Last Year Has Taught Me about Happiness
I’m proud of how sane we’ve stayed over the last year, but we really need our lives back now.
When I really sit and think about what has happened over the last crazy year, I find it phenomenal that we’ve managed to stay as happy as we have. Life as we knew it did a U-turn. We all had to adapt our lives, and what we did to make us happy.
This time last year I had plans to go to see live music, watch live football, see my family, go to the races, go to Paris! One by one, each of these events got cancelled. I was so in denial that things were changing, that I got my hair dyed a week before lockdown. I was convinced that everything would be fine.
Like most people, I wasn’t ready to give up my life as I knew it.
We all know where the story goes next…
We had to pause doing the things we love and seeing the people we love. We had to find new ways to stay happy, and if not happy, at least sane.
Where we’ve focussed our energy over the last year, has helped us to adapt and find new ways to be happy. But as we start to feel lockdown coming to an end, we’re all desperate to actually start having fun again & this is why we all really need it…
Happiness is driven by a mixture of pleasure and purpose.
This concept was first brought to my attention when I was 22. I had just finished my degree, I was about to graduate and take a flight to Asia to live carefree for the next two months. I was having the summer of a lifetime.
I was on holiday in Mexico, reading a book by Paul Dolan: Happiness by Design. This book is based on the principle, that as humans, we get our happiness from pleasure — watching TV, going to the pub, listening to live music, going on holiday and purpose — work, charity work, raising children, training for a marathon.
Some of us have a greater tendency to be a ‘pleasure machine’, others lean towards being a “purpose machine.” The mix of where you source your happiness from can also change over time.
Pleasure
You might have already guessed it, but when I first read this book, I got almost all of my happiness from pleasure. Yes, there was some purpose thrown in there. I enjoyed studying and hoped that one day I’d use my knowledge to change the world. But, that was the vision for when I was 40. At 22, I lived for nights out, seeing my friends, seeing the world. Life was one big adventure. I was on the fun train and I never wanted to get off.
I imagine most of you reading this will say that your early 20s were similar. No matter who you speak to, everyone talks about their 20s with such fondness. The memories of sticky club floors. Living with your best friends. The crazy situations you found yourself in abroad. Your 20s are often filled with fun memories that you’re terrified of your children replicating.
The research backs this up. When you’re younger, you get the majority of your happiness from pleasure. The joy you get from pleasure starts high and continues to rise until your mid-30s. The happiness you get from purpose is practically non-existent in your teens and increases as you get older. When you hit your 70s, this declines again. I’m sure that anyone with children can relate — your sources of happiness in your 40s are probably very different to those from your 20s.
Purpose
As I moved through my 20s, I definitely noticed this shift. Soon after returning from my “summer of a lifetime,” I was already starting to realise that I wanted my happiness balance to change. I was enjoying the start of my career. I enjoyed learning and having value to deliver. I started going to the gym, and I enjoyed that focus. I started running, and I enjoyed seeing the progress of getting faster and going further.
After falling asleep on another Friday night train home from London after a few beverages, I decided to complete dry January. That same month, I signed up for a marathon.
How insane. Four short months after thinking I never wanted to get off the fun train, I deliberately stripped myself of most fun and set off on a purpose mission. & I loved it. I loved training, I loved looking after myself, I loved sleeping well at night. I loved seeing progress.
When I crossed the finish line of the Marathon, I loved the fact that I had achieved something so mega and that happiness and feeling of pure elation will stay with me forever.
I literally flipped from being a pleasure machine, into a purpose machine.
I understood it; I understood how the balance between pleasure and purpose did actually give me the most happiness.
Others talk about how we need this kind of purpose in our life to be genuinely happy — the mindset, the problems to solve, the things to work towards to become who we really want to be. Being in tune with what genuinely motivates us and gives us long-term satisfaction, is a necessary component in our well-being. This is why you dial down the pleasure and dial up the purpose as you get older. You become more in tune with what drives your values and what you really want to get out of life.
Getting happiness from purpose doesn’t have to look the same for everyone. I’m sure you all have your own examples of this kind of change or challenges. We can’t help it as humans. We love having something to work towards and feel proud of — that’s where the happiness from purpose comes in. Sometimes in the moment, you think — why the hell am I doing this, but it all becomes worthwhile.
The pandemic turned most of us into purpose machines.
Let’s talk about how this has applied to the last year.
Imagine it’s March 2020. You have big plans. You finally got Glastonbury tickets (I wish). The Euros are being played across the continent. It’s going to be a perfect beer garden season. Then boom, Corona hits.
This unimaginable virus, with unthinkable consequences. We lost loved ones, lost jobs, and we all had to change everything about our lives as we knew them.
I won’t dwell on the first points, but it’s important to remember that for some, this year has been much harder than just losing out on the lifestyle that made them happy.
I will focus on how incredibly we’ve all adapted because we can take so many learnings from this.
When you think back to lockdown 1.0, it didn’t seem that bad. The sun was shining. The challenge of working from home was fresh. That long commute was out of your life. People were able to spend more time with their families. You finally had time to breathe at the weekends — you weren’t exhausted from jumping from one weekend plan to another.
We adapted. We attempted to replace the pleasure that had been taken away from us. We made banana bread. We overdid zoom quizzes. We binge-watched Tiger King & Normal People. My furloughed friends made their own gardens into permanent beer gardens. Almost everyone got a dog (no complaints from me on this one).
We found the fun that we needed. But it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t going to replace how we’d been living our lives. There was still a huge gap for most people.
So what did most of us do to make up for it? We replaced our pleasure happiness with purpose happiness.
Now, some people were forced into this. Homeschooling your children, from what I’ve seen, if it is going to give any joy — it is definitely purpose-driven rather than pleasure-driven. In fact, anyone that has managed to survive and do this is an absolute saint.
For the rest of us, unknowingly at the time, we naturally shifted our energy towards purpose-driven activities. I decided to learn skills that I’d never had the time for. My friend taught us Spanish. I finally learned how to use my camera in manual mode. I taught myself HTML & CSS. I focussed on my career and development. I started writing.
There is something so satisfying about gaining a new skill, with no expectations, but just enjoying the process of improving it.
My friends did the same. So many people started running overnight. People started side businesses. They renovated houses. They put their energy into building their relationships and moving in together. Everyone was using this time to pause and reflect on what they actually wanted and build their lives to suit this.
We’ve also been able to realise what we’re really missing out on. When you think about what you’ve really missed over the last year, you will find the important elements of fun that you need to bake back into your life. The areas that you haven’t missed so much — maybe hanging out with friends that you don’t really like, spending every day hungover, spending too much money on things you don’t really care about — they’re the things to avoid. If you’ve found happiness in the small things, like walks & baking & talking to your friends, then it’s worth remembering that you can find happiness in these things.
I genuinely believe that if we use this time effectively to reflect on what made us happy whilst everything slowed down, we will look back and be grateful for the year that forced us to pause, take stock of what we had, feel grateful and reset.
Now we really need our pleasure back.
So that brings me to now. We’re in what we all sincerely hope is the last month of the last lockdown. & I am exhausted, drained, and most crucially — I am bored.
These last few months really have felt like Groundhog Day. The novelty of working from home has well and truly worn off. I have explored every inch of my local area. I have been to almost every coffee shop in the city. I am almost at the end of my lockdown to-do list — you know, all of the things you needed to fix that you never had time to before.
We’ve almost completed every decent series on Netflix. We’re over quizzes. We know we can’t just keep eating and drinking our way through the pandemic.
I have plenty of activities I could do that give me purpose — including writing this. But without the fun to balance it out, it gets harder to find the motivation and focus on the long-term gratification.
I am still grateful for all of the things that we do get to do, but it is getting harder and harder to fill the gap in happiness that has been taken away.
We’re simple creatures, we often motivate ourselves by being able to see the rewards of the things that we do. Often, we also reward ourselves. It’s a lot easier to do something when you know you have something to look forward to afterward. Without these things to look forward to it can be hard to keep plugging away at purpose-driven activities.
You’re also more likely to remember memories driven by fun activities than purposeful ones. We typically remember the highlight and the final moment of an event. As purposeful activities are typically sustained over time and don’t always have peaks or a clear ending, these don’t stay as vividly in our minds. This helps to explain why a lot of us feel like this year has just passed us by.
Humans thrive off of hope and having things to look forward to. We’ve spent this year practising how we can look forward to the small things. I now look forward to having a bath, a brew, seeing one friend. But, we all know it’s not the same.
It’s not a replacement for the excitement we feel for a big night out. It’s not the joy we feel when planning a holiday. It’s not the buzz you get when you’re waiting for your favourite band to walk out on stage.
We need these things to get us through our purposeful activities. These events give us life. They make everything feel worthwhile & they give us the memories that we treasure forever.
This is why we need a balance of pleasure and purpose. We need the sweet equilibrium. Often, we can swing far too heavily one way or the other, but the principle of diminishing returns means that we’re all a lot happier when we have a good balance of both.
So as much as we all should continue to drive the happiness we’ve found from purpose, and appreciate the small things we’ve found that drive pleasure, we also need to think about how we strike the right balance and find that equilibrium going forwards.
If you do anything in the next month, find the time to reflect on what you’ve loved the most and what you’ve missed the most over the last year. And work out how you can create a life that gives you all of those things going forwards.
I know that if someone asks me what I’m missing the most, it’s the simple things — hugging my family, having a laugh over a pint...
But it’s also the big things. The impulse to hug the closest person to you when the ball hits the back of the net. The excitement you feel when you jump in that swimming pool for the first time. The wholesome feeling you have, watching the sunset after an amazing day exploring a different country. The ability to feel like the world is your oyster again. After a year of purpose, these are the things that I need in my life again.
