Settling for Happiness

For most of my life, I was fairly certain that the worst thing that could happen to me was an average life. Settling. I would think about working an average job (even one that I enjoyed) and coming home to a normal house and it all sounded like stagnation. It was the worst thing I could imagine. Most millennials have been told that they could be the best, which often translates into the implication that you should be the best. For me, this was the conviction that unless there was something in this world that I accomplished that no one else could, I was not doing enough.

Perfectionism is a nasty curse. There is always more that you could be doing. If you’re dedicating your life to writing, you’re losing out on your ability to make music or research neuroscience or learn languages. Possibility is always a kind of pressure. One of the biggest problems of defining yourself by your achievements is that there are always more things to be achieved. You might reach one of your goals, but there are five more that you could complete today alone. “Average” tends to be defined by goals and accomplishments. You know someone is outstanding when you can point to their resume of accomplishments. Or so we’re taught to believe.

The problem with this model is that I know dozens of people who have done amazing things in their lives. All of them have found different ways to excel, and dedicated themselves to whatever their passion is. I hear news stories almost daily about people accomplishing things I could never hope to achieve. There’s no way to live up to all of these possibilities. What I don’t hear is stories of contentment. There are very few people in my life who seem to simply exist in the space that they’re in without any energy pushing them somewhere else, any driving need to be doing more or appearing better.

Contentment is not a competition. If all your friends are content with their lives, you don’t have to be more content in order to feel ok. In contrast, achievement and perfection are values that compare: the more your friends achieve, the more you have to achieve if you want your achievements to stand out.

So here’s a new goal: settling for happiness. Are you content with your job? Do you have a place to live and a regular income? Do you have people that you love? Do you get to see those people on a regular basis? Awesome. Settle for that. Relish it.

A few nights ago I got to see my friends for the first time in over a month. We didn’t do much. Ate some cookies, played Mario Kart, and just goofed around with each other. I laughed a lot. I smiled. I got hugged and teased and affirmed. It was hardly a mind-blowing experience, except that there was no anxiety, no worry, no desire to be anywhere but where I was.

Yesterday I went to the Renaissance Festival with some new friends and felt nothing but affection and excitement for who I was with. I was a little tired and didn’t have the money to spend on all the exciting things I saw, but again, there was no question in my mind that this was where I wanted to be and these were the people that I wanted to be with.

Tomorrow I’m starting a new job and I’m a little anxious, but I get to hang out with one of my best friends afterwards, and I know that no matter what happens or whether the job is a good fit or not, I get at least a few hours tomorrow of pure contentment. That’s more than some people can say in months. That’s amazing.

I’m not saving the world. I’m not making tons of money. I’m not living in the nicest house or recognized around the world as a world changing genius. But I like who I am and I like who I’m with. I will settle for that any day over saving the world, because I have saved my world. Somewhere along the way I hope to improve the lives of some people around me, but the best way to do that is by being happy and doing things I like to do. So I’m going to settle. I don’t necessarily need a high powered career or a book deal. I don’t necessarily need an excess of disposable income. I suppose if that’s settling, then I’m all for it, because I’d rather be happy than amazing.

The Nature of Success

This weekend I was at my cousin’s graduation, and as per usual I found myself comparing myself to the graduates. In most graduation ceremonies, the accomplishments of the graduating class are highlighted, to show how much they’ve done and accomplished in their time at college. It usually involves things like talking about GPAs, publishing, traveling and studying abroad, research, etc. Many of them are very quantifiable: accomplishment unlocked, my paper has been published. Accomplishment unlocked, I graduated summa cum laude. And on and on.

 

And so if you’ve achieved all of these things you’re supposed to be “successful”. So what do we mean by successful? Generally we mean someone who has graduated with good grades, who has accomplished something outstanding like publication or research, who has a well-paying job, perhaps someone with a house and a car, someone who has lots of friends and a significant other. Mostly we mean material success and the academic success that leads to material success. These things are all linked far too closely to separate: most people only get good grades in school because they want to graduate and get a good job. People don’t view learning in and of itself as success- they view grades and the diploma as success. There are quantifiable measures that allow us to compete against each other and see who has the most.

 

I must admit that I am hugely guilty of doing this myself. As I mentioned before, I found myself comparing to the graduates: did I have higher grades than they did, did I have more distinctions than they did, had I published, had I gone abroad. The points where I found myself lacking, I berated myself. It’s unfortunate, because we generally don’t see success as a holistic question: we don’t ask whether someone is at a point in their life in which they are generally happy or generally well taken care of. We make a list of points to compare. Whoever gets the most points wins the success game.

 

Why on earth do we do this? I have to say that I don’t entirely get it. Yes, people do often have natural competitive drives, and these things fuel those drives, and yes, it’s easier to use quantifiable numbers rather than qualitative descriptions (and when we do studies we HAVE to use quantifiable numbers). Yes this is the only practical way to do grades and create salaries and so on. But in our personal lives we could afford to be a bit more nuanced in our thinking.

 

To take an example: my cousin graduated from college this weekend. She graduated with decent grades, good friend, and a good boyfriend. She doesn’t have a job yet, but she has a supportive family and a good degree. She knows fairly well what she wants to do. In contrast, I graduated from college in three years with two majors and high honors. I had a job coming out of college and moved out of my parents’ home two months later. However I graduated with a shit boyfriend who treated me nearly abusively, almost no friends, still in the process of battling a serious eating disorder, and generally depressed and anxious. Which one of us is more successful?

 

It’s impossible to tell. You can’t compare these things, all you can do is look at the individual life and see its strengths and weaknesses. If and when I feel I’m recovered, I will feel a tremendous amount of success, but that’s not something I can ever write on a resume or that I will ever get credit for in my work or professional life. None of us understand the intricacies of another person’s situation in life, and none of us understand the barriers that might have existed for them. If someone goes into college trying to provide for and raise a child, it might be success for them to graduate at all, much less get some kind of honors or publish a paper. Success is contextual, just as failure is.

 

I would like to define success as overcoming obstacles. If that were the case, then my college degree would be a minor success in comparison to starting to open up to my family, finding a boyfriend who cares for me, standing up for myself, or openly blogging about my thoughts and feelings every day. This definition gives us the flexibility to see the obstacles that an individual must overcome and to congratulate them on whatever they accomplish against those obstacles.

 

It will be a success for me when I can accept that definition of success.