Whenever I travel to and from the airport, I am fetched by a lovely man. When you ask him how he is, the answer is: "Always good."
To him, it's a privilege to wake up. To experience life. He never takes it for granted.
He has a point. He has figured out how to keep life's struggles from reaching his inner being. I know that he faces challenges, and that he aspires, yet he doesn't allow those to determine his mental state. Or his answer.
It reminded me of an article about one of my favourite authors, happiness researcher Dr Arthur Brooks. It talked about how he would always make a list of his desires, ambitions, and things he wanted to accomplish. A bucket list. But when he was 50, he found his bucket list from when he was 40. He'd checked everything off it. Yet he was less happy at 50 than at 40.
He realised that he was making the mistake of thinking that satisfaction would come from having more. Brooks says that this isn't a character flaw. Our brains evolved to equate resource accumulation with survival and status. Every time we tick off something from our bucket list, we get a brief lift, which quickly fades, and our ancient wiring reads that fade as a sign we need more. Status, for most of human history, meant safety within the tribe, so desiring more was never designed to switch off.
But lasting satisfaction comes not from attaining more but wanting less. It's about reducing what you want relative to what you already have.
Brooks concluded that he needed a "reverse bucket list" that would help him "consciously detach" from his worldly wants and desires by simply writing them down and crossing them off. He says that human evolutionary psychology would lead us to naturally want more, strive, and aspire, but that we shouldn't be owned by those drives. Instead, we should manage them. He still makes the list, but he crosses out every item immediately, resolving not to be owned by them.
It has been my own practise to revise my dream list every year too. Somehow, I came to this same conclusion, that dreams are wonderful but that they should be held lightly.
The challenge is to realise that happiness cannot be deferred to some future date when we have achieved everything we set out to, our investment portfolios are large enough, or we've experienced all we wanted to. In fact, a life where there is nothing to strive for, look forward to, and even worry about, is probably a meaningless life. It's not a life I would want. We want to die with outstanding dreams but with no regrets of not having fulfilled those dreams.
While there is still a future to improve, and we are still alive, my friend the driver reminds me that being good cannot be determined by what's outstanding.
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Kind regards,
Sunél
