Pebbles

Sometimes it feels like we spend a great deal of our lives trying to balance all the ingredients & things that together will make us happy. Like pebbles on the shore. These do vary somewhat from person to person, but they are likely to include elements like: love, friendships & family, health&body, finances&work, self worth&development. It is an exhausting process and more often than not we find that at one particular point in time we feel like we have mastered some but not all of these elements.

The problem is that these things often work against each other. For instance if we are out there having a great time travelling the world with our mates, we might find that we feel out of shape and broke. Or, if work is going great, we might find that we are not putting a lot of effort in our relationships or we do not have time to cultivate our passions.

This is a bit of a pickle, and might just lead us to keep doing this 'balancing act' throughout our lives, as though there was some sort of mathematical formula of happiness that we are trying to uncover and exploit for the rest of our lives.

In turn this might make us feel that ' we are not quite there yet'.

To make things more complex, the standards that we use to assess success for each of the 'pebbles that make up happiness' changes over time. For instance, what we regard as successful at work, or the value we place or money becomes more demanding as we grow older. If when we started working out the El Dorado was being able to run 5km, by the time we run 5km we feel that we need to run a marathon.

Growing, developing and becoming better people is obviously something positive - however it does make it very hard to ever feel we have fully arrived.

Despite all this there are moments in life where we do feel truly happy and content with what's going on. It might be a great night out with our best friends, or the day of our wedding, or the day we finally achieved that long wanted promotion, etc etc. If we think about it, these are not moments where 'we have it all', where we have achieved that elusive balance of pebbles. More likely, these moments of happiness are just instants where we simply do not wish anything more than we already have.

Expectations play a massive role in the way we perceive happiness. And since we tend to be quite bad at predicting what will make us happy then it is key that we proactively manage our expectations in such a way that we do not set up ourselves objectives that might end up failing to bring us that happiness we had expected them to bring us. For instance, at work we might set up ourselves an objective to become a Managing Director because we believe that we will feel happy from a career perspective once we get there. However, after sweating over it for years and finally getting there we might discover that being an MD did not do anything to make us happier and that we should have focussed more on other things in our lives. We should never second guess happiness.

That is why it is worth spending time understanding what is the baseline of our own happiness, the rough ingredients that bring us happiness. I think that this baseline is less changeable over time, and in many ways it is easier to determine that the end point where we guess we should get to. For instance, whilst the definition of a top holiday will become more demanding over the years, the fact that we love spending time with our best mates has not really changed since we were broke students.

The other thing that I think is important is what I call 'the ten years time test' i.e. asking ourselves how we will feel about something in ten years time. It is fair to say that things like the missed promotion will not seem so important after all, whilst the fact that we did not cultivate our passion for painting is more likely to stick around as a regret. The ten years time test is a great way to determine the baseline of our own happiness.

In practical terms our baseline will include things like determining what is the minimum amount of money that we require to do the things we love, and then accepting that anything above that will please us, but it will not make us happier people (this might be liberating and make us realise that we can change job/career and still be happy).

Happiness then is not about constantly trying to balance a pile of pebbles, it is more like stripping down the expectations that we have imposed on ourselves and live life in such a way that our older self will look back with no regrets.