Intro
All of us, from a very early age, are told how to live our lives.
We’re given stories about what the perfect life looks like
and some of those stories work for some people some of the time
but not all of us all of the time.
There’s no checklist that each of us should tick off
in order to live a perfect life.
Being rich
One of the myths is that being rich will make you happy.
It’s certainly true that being poor makes you miserable.
Once you get to about £30-40,000 a year
certainly £50,000 at most,
you’ve probably reached the peak of happiness by income.
And actually more money after that point
might not just make you no happier
but actually might make you more miserable.
It’s addictive.
You get sucked in and you need more and more and more to be happy.
So the best approach is not to say: “more please”
but just to say: “just enough”.
A successful career
Another myth is that you need a successful career to be happy.
You certainly need some status in your life
but again, you can become addicted and get too much.
It’s interesting that the jobs we’re told to aspire to,
being a banker, being a lawyer,
actually don’t make people that happy.
Certainly no happier than being a hairdresser or a florist
where some of the evidence suggests
that people working in those jobs are actually happier.
Now, it might be that happier people go into those jobs in the first place
but there are important dimensions and attributes of those jobs
that lend themselves to being happy.
You’re working with people that you like being with,
you can see the fruits of your labour,
all of these things are good characteristics of a good job
a good job insofar as it makes you feel good
and not just how much you earn and how much status you have in it.
Falling in love
One of the things that we need to achieve
in order to lead the perfect life
is to fall in love by finding ‘the one’.
What nonsense.
First of all, ‘the one’ doesn’t exist. There’s many ‘the ones’
There’s many people that would be perfectly suitable for you.
Once you’ve found them,
the idea that you should be in love with them,
passionate love with them, forever,
is actually dysfunctional.
Passionate love, in any normally functioning relationship
dies after a year or two
and that turns to companionate love
and that’s healthy because it enables you to then move on
and do things in life,
maybe have children, pursue projects.
Passion ought to die in functional relationships.
It’s a massive story that you should still be
in passionate love with someone after a decade or two.
You should be in love with them, but in a slightly different way.
Marriage
One of the stories that we’re told from a very early age
is that we need to get married.
It’s the checklist of things that you need achieve in order to grow up.
Well again, marriage can make some people happy, some of the time
but not all of the people all of the time.
Children
One of the things that a fully-fledged grown-up does
is have children, right?
That’s what people are expected to do.
And it’s true that many people want children,
of course many people have children,
but some people don’t want them.
One of the things that’s expected of us when we have children
is that our children will make us happy,
not just some of the time but all of the time.
The evidence tells us, quite clearly I think,
that children do bring us moments of joy,
they can also feel quite purposeful
but they bring long periods of stress, anxiety and worry
that wouldn’t have happened had you not had them.
And that’s fine, that’s what children do.
The myth of these stories
is that everybody needs to lead the same life.
It leads us to judge other people
that live their lives differently to us and we shouldn’t.
Each of us needs to find our own route to happiness.
There’s no one-size-fits-all narrative.
