On this gloriously miserable Friday morning, as the sky insists it still has some water left to dump on us, hundreds of people in the UK are in the throes of a flooding disaster, and the world is poised on the brink of a likely viral pandemic, I’ve been thinking about what actually makes us happy. To be clear, people wading through water in their lounge and Coronavirus do not make me happy, but it all does make me think about appreciating life, and how we all spend far too much time not really living our lives.

I don’t mean this to be some deep dive into the meaning of life – when I start thinking about that I get palpitations thinking about the vastness of the universe and what the chuff went on with the big bang (or big bangs, plural?!Oh no), and come to the conclusion that’s probably what most people do and it’s best to skip to the conclusion of 42. What I’m getting at is, given that we are all milling around for x number of years on this tremendous planet, what makes that milling a good mill. When we are 100 (let’s think positive eh?), what will make us look back and think ‘that was a good innings’?

Materialism

Yesterday I spotted a daily fail article on fast fashion mountains – huge swathes of clothes people had thrown out. I can’t pretend that I keep pace with the changing seasons of fashion, but that’s mostly because I can’t understand why anyone would want to. I obviously need to buy clothes, and it’s not that I don’t want to look nice, or that I don’t enjoy the odd designer treat, I just don’t care that mustard is en trend this autumn. I rarely enjoy clothes shopping. And I think herein lies something to ponder. While I could sit on my judgmental laurels and point fingers and those serial fast fashion offenders, is that actually fair? I mean, I don’t think it’s fair to judge anyone as a rule (but let’s be honest, we’ve all done it at some point), but just because I don’t really care about Gucci, is it right to start hating on the person who does?

So there’s the obvious environmental aspect to this – we should all try to avoid buying single or short life anything, and try wherever possible to get quality and organic (lots of companies advertising this now). But there’s the other aspect to this that is why is keeping up with fashion so important to someone? I’m sure there are people who truly love it, and it is to those few people I would argue let them have their joy without judgement. But I have no doubt the vast majority become a ball of trend because that is what the pressure of our society has made them.

Consumerism can be damaging

The more I think about it, the more it enrages me that we grow up believing that we must have *insert whatever possession* to not just be happy, but to even be able to function on the same playing field as we think the next person does. We are constantly bombarded with advertisements of things that promise to make our lives easier, better, more streamlined. And what makes it hard is that occasionally one of these things may actually just do that. But mostly? Mostly it’s just crap. Crap to make someone money. And we want to believe that the perfume, the deodorant, the dress, the hair straightener, is going to make us irresistible to the opposite sex. And they all may do, but I think we all know that no one ever loved anyone because their hair was shiny. I totally get that we all like to look nice (my view is on a basic level that can make us feel good) and that we all have a strong preference for our other halves to not actually follow through on the I’d-marry-you-in-a-bin-liner on our wedding day, but I think we all have a regular tendency to take it all too far. And it’s detrimental to our health and our happiness.

Happiness

This brings me onto happiness. To look back at a good innings, surely this means that you’ve had a fulfilling, happy life. At face value this seems easy enough to understand. But is it? I think happiness is another term that can be misunderstood a little. To be happy does not mean that you are happy the entire time, and that any lapse in happiness means you have failed to attain happy. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I genuinely think we have become wired to think that to be happy means we have to have that warm fuzzy post-comfort-food-infront-of-fire feeling all the time (note to self, I want comfort food and fire). No one is that happy always, because it’s impossible. To be happy we are almost certainly have to do things that are hard, uncomfortable, and difficult at times. Graduating from medical school was one of the happiest days of my life, but I couldn’t have done it without painfully memorising many biological pathway whose names now escape me and I’m sure most doctors.

Fulfilling is another term I think can be misunderstood. In my humble opinion, fulfilling (and happiness) does not mean running around like a blue arsed fly 24/7 until you have been a successful mother, wife, employee and homemaker. Fulfilling does not mean fill your life literally – productivity and success on their own do not make for a fulfilled or happy life. Fulfilled means living a full life. With that comes the importance of self-care, of taking time for yourself and what you enjoy.

Do what makes you happy

So what does actually make you happy? Is it actually Gucci? (right now imagining many people saying ‘yes, it’s Gucci, give me Gucci’). We all have to tidy the house now and then (note to self, must tidy house, in laws coming this weekend), but can that wait until we’ve taken time to do the things that make us happy? All too often the first thing we give up when we are stressed, everything is too much, is the one thing that keeps us sane. Because it’s usually thing that we need for our own self-care, we classify it as a luxury in our mind, and we worry people may judge us for having the audacity to indulge such frivolities. It is not a luxury, it is the very thing that keeps us going, maybe even the thing that should define us more than anything. We should and need to do that thing on a regular basis. So today do the thing that makes you happy – go for a bike ride, read a book, make a pancake (go on, be a lent rebel), jump in muddy puddles with your children. Make it your priority. I’ll be running around a tennis court with my kids. And then enjoying that comfort food by the fire. Yum.