There's an oft-quoted saying that goes something like:
If you love work you'll never work a day in your life.
While this sounds nice, is it true? If I got to write every day, some days would still be "work". They'd be hard and I'd have nothing to say. I'd rather go cycling instead of sitting down at the keyboard.
Heck, I only get to write and research a bit a few days a week and sometimes it feels like work already.
I think this saying falls into a concept I keep thinking about called the "happiness rhetoric". Today I'm going to explore it more with you.
We should be Happy
Cal Newport spent a good chunk of So Good They Can't Ignore You exploring happiness at work. He concluded that the "passion" hypothesis was simply wrong1. Instead of finding that job that truly fulfilled their passion, people were far more likely to job hop looking for that perfect job that had no hardship. People were looking for some job that immediately fit, where they had mastery from the beginning.
But no one finds that. Everything worthwhile takes hard work. When confronted with this reality after the glow of a new attempt at a perfect job wore off it was time to look for a new job. Worse, once you've done this a few times you start to build up self-doubt as you wonder if it's possible to find a job that you'll be happy in.
Or maybe you're like most people and instead of realizing that maybe something is wrong with you, you blame the job. Your boss didn't recognize your talent. A coworker took all the credit and thus you were not advancing as you should. Maybe a coworker didn't do their work and you "paid the price" as you got laid off.
It's always easier to blame some external factor than it is to take responsibility for our own behaviour and the outcomes that behaviour brings our way.
We Confuse Happiness and Success
We also spend a lot of time confusing happiness and success. We fall into the mistaken belief that if we get the next raise, or hit our sales target we'll be happy2. This is not the pattern that is shown when we look at people that are happy with their work and life though.
Much research shows that first we work hard and become masters at our work and then as we start to see our mastery we grow into happiness with our work. Despite the research, very few people believe it and pursue mastery knowing that happiness will come as they achieve mastery.
On Stress
We also spend a lot of effort confusing stress with something bad. When I'm doing my 5th sprint uphill during a cycling hill workout I'm under lots of stress. My legs are burning. My nose is running. I'm gasping for air.
Yet all of those symptoms are not something I shy away from as bad. They are signs that I'm pushing my body towards a higher level of fitness. By pushing my body hard I'm helping it learn that it needs to be conditioned for those high levels of output and should adapt to accommodate them.
I'm building resilience3.
Stress isn't bad, it's our attitude towards situations that push us that determines if the stress is negative or positive4. We've allowed ourselves to become convinced that happiness rhetoric is real and that we should never have any bad feelings come our way. When we encounter stress we figure something must be wrong and we should avoid the feeling.
Finding Happiness
If we agree that happiness rhetoric is faulty and maybe it's not terrible to be unhappy sometimes and if we agree that stress isn't always bad, then where do we build a life that feels fulfilling?
First, we need to look for mastery instead of passion. Second, we need to acknowledge that it's our attitude about stress that makes it good or bad5. Third, we need to realize that despite what the internet shows us, happy people don't have more stuff than us that's nicer. Happy people are happy with what they have no matter how nice it is or how little they have6.
It's far easier to say these things than it is to do them, so let's look at a few concrete steps you can take.
Letting Go of Definitions of Happiness
The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn't spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who's having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves7.
There is no single definition of happiness, it's all relative to a person and it can change throughout their lives. When you're in your early 20s maybe it's about going to parties and being free. When you're in your 30s you're looking to start a family or settle down a bit and have some more routine. Then in your 40s, it may change again.
One of the first things you can do as you try to find what happiness means to you is to forget about the definitions of happiness of others. Often that includes what your parents think you should be doing. Maybe your father thinks you'd be a good teacher so he always talks about going to school to become a teacher. Maybe your mother is very uncomfortable with your life as a freelancer and continues to send you jobs that are "more stable".
You need to let go of those well-intentioned ideas for your future and pursue the life you want to lead. I know we want those close to us to think that what we're doing is good, but it may not happen.
When we let go of the expectations others put on our lives it's easy to fall into another trap, seeing the life someone else leads and wanting that life.
I've fallen into this trap a few times. I see cycling people on YouTube and think it would be great to ride all the time as they do. Then it comes down to doing video work daily on bikes and....yeah I don't want to do that hard work. I just want to ride bikes and not think much about the video part.
I've had to give up the pursuit of what others have a few times because I've started to view it as my ideal life.
Finally, you are going to have to give up your past definitions of happiness. I've found this to be one of the hardest things to give up on, but also the most freeing.
Allowing yourself to change what happiness means to you gives you the freedom to abandon commitments you no longer want. When we moved to Prince George I did not join the school parent council again. I'm not part of training the kids for track or x-country. Instead, I'm working at the bike shop one day a week and volunteering with the cycling club.
I was lucky that a huge move gave me some cover to change what I was doing, but I've also quit things without some big life event. I was on the board of a college and partway through my second term I realized that it was far too much to do while I had kids that needed me lots so I handed in my resignation effective after the Annual General Meeting. While doing this I had to give up on a vision of myself that was active on boards and thus "successful".
Letting that commitment go was a huge weight off my shoulders. It did allow me to focus more on what was going on a home and help my wife work through a very tough time with her job. That work ultimately had us move for her job to Prince George.
While I let go of a part of my identity I liked, I got to move to a city that I'm really loving.
Finding Happiness as a Parent
Parenting is hard, anyone that tells you it's easy is lying to you. There are late nights with babies as they cry. There are toddlers coming into video meetings telling about the 3 poops they just had. There are times when you're trying to be intimate with your partner and your children ask why you're wrestling so loudly.
Teens have hard days and tell you how terrible you are. You compare yourself with the curated lives of others and realize how short your reality falls compared to their fanciful life.
Having children has had many of these same struggles since parenting started. There were Neanderthal children up late, and teens rebelling from their parents.
Much of the extra struggle with parenting today is that we have put a much higher requirement on what it means to be a good parent8. Fathers are supposed to attain a huge salary so that they can pay for any renovations needed on the house, all the activities children are signed up for, and for the vacations that must be taken.
Mothers are supposed to keep a perfectly clean house while holding down a good job and doing most of the child care. They're supposed to have huge fun birthdays for children organized and keep those memorable play dates going. Then they're supposed to be ultra-sexy for their partners.
These requirements have crept up on us over the last number of decades. My mom didn't organize play dates for me, she sent me outside when I was bugging her and I found my own play on the street solo or with other children. Sure she read to us and got us good snacks, but she did stuff around the house and read books while we played. She didn't feel guilty about not playing with us every moment or not throwing huge birthday parties.
She never viewed it as her job to make sure we were entertained all the time.
This is probably the biggest life change we've had moving to Prince George BC. In Chilliwack, our townhouse had a bunch of rules around when children were allowed to play outside and what "supervision" meant. Here, kids are in the street playing catch or hockey. Kids are in and out of backyards playing. My single neighbour next door expects that sometimes a ball will go over the fence and somebody will hop over it to get the ball back.
Both my wife and I feel much calmer here without needing to entertain children inside all the time. Chores aren't as hard, and our kids are happier. My middle child, who is fairly rowdy, has had less trouble getting into stuff around the house now that she gets to play outside for hours a day a number of days a week.
While this does bring up many issues about the income required to have space for children to play freely, and the environment of neighbours that figure kids should play outside, all parents need to let themselves off the hook.
Make your kids do more chores. Let them be bored and entertain themselves.
As a society, we need to realize that an unwatched child is not a tragedy waiting to happen9.
The life-long fulfillment of your child does not depend on the art projects you think up for them. It's mostly in their hands, all you need to do is provide a safe encouraging environment and then get out of their way.
Finding Happiness at Work
When it comes to work, let go of the notion that you must find happiness at work to have a good life. While I find programming interesting, I don't expect that I should find all of the fulfillment in my life from my job. My job pays bills and helps facilitate getting to spend time with my kids and getting to do other things that I enjoy.
What other job would let me work 3 days a week for 3-4 hours and then do what I want with the rest of my time?
This was a revelation for me. I spent a number of years hating programming because it wasn't fulfilling at some undefined profound level. Once I recognized that it facilitated a life where I could read books, ride bikes, write about stuff I want to write about, and build a YouTube channel I stopped worrying about how to find happiness in every moment of programming.
Instead, I look for interesting projects that pay well and let me do what I want.
I've looked for more ways to gain autonomy over my schedule10. I refuse meetings unless it's on a specific day of the week, and I regularly book that day for other things. If I'm not feeling like working on a Friday, I let myself do whatever else I want and don't worry that I'm not living up to the unrealistic societal expectations of how many hours I should put in.
Your happiness is in your hands. It's in the choices you make day-to-day. It's in how you view the world. It's in how you stop falling for the curated lives of people you see online. Happiness comes when you stop raising the expectations for your achievement every day and start being happy
If you balk at that statement, maybe it's time to grow up and start taking responsibility for your life instead of being the type of person that blames some external factor to absolve yourself of guilt.
- So Good They Can't Ignore You Loc 357 ↩
- The Happiness Advantage Loc 72 ↩
- The Obstacle is The Way Loc 88 ↩
- The No Worries Guide to Raising Your Anxious Child Page 102 ↩
- No this isn't universally true. Sitting in the middle of a war zone is stressful in a bad way. Being the victim of abuse is stressful in a bad way. Outside of extreme circumstances like those, stress is bad is all in your head. ↩
- The Organized Mind Page 5 ↩
- Anxious People Loc 763 ↩
- The No Worries Guide to Raising Your Anxious Child Page 49 ↩
- Free Range Kids 5% ↩
- Leaders Eat Last Page 36 ↩