Is it OK to feel satisfied with life?

Have we become suspicious of our own contentment, worried that it means we aren't pushing ourselves hard enough?

Few of us would stand here and mutter to ourselves, ‘I wish I was at work’.

First, a quick note on what follows.

In my professional life I’ve been collecting questions for years, from clients, from freelance work, and from people who learn what I do and immediately want to know if it’s odd to be phobic of chinook helicopters (it isn’t odd to be phobic of anything). I’ve written a lot of them down in a notebook. Literally hundreds of them.

I created a separate newsletter to publish some of these Q&As because it struck me that if one person wants to know whether there’s any point in going to therapy, there are almost certainly others that do. But having to update two separate publications quickly became onerous. So, I’ve combined them here.

Alongside the lengthier essays, I’m going to be publishing my answers to some of these questions. Not in the way we might do if we were working in therapy together, but the honest gut-feel answer I’d give if it were my only shot, which it often is.

So, if you have something related to mental health you’d like to ask, I’m always happy to hear from you.

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This week, in a novel twist for a therapist, a question about whether or not it’s OK to feel satisfied with life.

Although it might seem like a strange problem to have, the modern fascination with pushing harder and doing more has created a hustle culture that threatens to have us constantly second guessing ourselves whenever we feel OK.

Some years ago, working with a client who found himself in the midst of burnout, depressed, and drinking too much, I asked,

‘Why do you think you keep going?’

‘So that one day I can be free,’ he replied.

He was serious.

In the relentless drive toward a reward that’s promised tomorrow, it’s easy to compromise our health to such a degree that we risk never getting there at all.

A search on the phrase ‘hustle culture’ will return over 30 million posts, and none that I’ve read have anything positive to say about it.

So why are people driven to work so hard, over and above what’s necessary to pay the bills?

It might be because rejecting the endless grind we have been taught to embrace induces a feeling of fear that we probably aren’t living as we ‘should’ be.

Worse still, as the hustle accelerates, thanks and validation become less frequent, often meaning that we go harder to try and ensure we get noticed.

If you’ve ever trained a dog, you’ll know the value of random reinforcement. Praise, given sporadically, maintains enthusiasm.

The attraction of hustle culture is similar, except that your dog can then spend the rest of the day sleeping under your desk, like Elon Musk.

The reason this weeks question attracted me is that it illustrates how we’ve lost touch with knowing what motivates us and feeling comfortable with that knowledge.

Feeling a sense of purpose, being good at something, and being left to get on with it are all valuable in keeping us content because they speak to what it is to feel like a worthwhile human being, but they can just as easily be applied to gardening or crochet as they can to whatever important tasks you have to do at work.

So, here is this week’s question. All details that might in any way compromise the confidentiality of the person who asked it have been either removed or changed, but the essence of the question remains the same.

Question:

Am I wrong to feel satisfied with what I have? I don’t feel that interested in being good at everything and having to demonstrate improvement all the time like many of my peers. I want time and space to enjoy life away from my work. Am I missing something?

Answer:

When you encounter what appears to be contentment in someone else, does it strike you as something bad, an indication that they might be ‘settling’, or do you see it as an emotion to be cherished and valued?

Do you feel it reasonable that your life should be about constantly forging a path forwards in all areas, or is the value you get from enjoying your time and pursuing activities and interests ends in and of themselves?

It might seem like a paradox but, letting go of the need to be good at something or constantly improve can be legitimately framed as a victory. Being hopeless at something or uninterested in whether or not it has utility or achievement inherent means you are more interested in the process than the outcome.

I’m terrible at art but I love to draw and paint. Stripped of the expectation and requirement to do it well, I can do it with freedom.

The reason that rejecting slavery to constant improvement is a blessing is that life is made up mostly of liminal space between achievements, successes and ‘big ticket’ experiences. So learning to appreciate the modest, simple and even mundane pleasure in everyday existence is almost guaranteed to bring you greater levels of happiness and contentment.

Underpinning your question appears to be an instinct to judge yourself negatively when feeling ambivalent about new opportunities for professional growth, but perhaps this is only because you have been sold the idea that unless you’re continually pushing for more, you’re not doing life ‘correctly’.

But what if you’ve seen through the lie that constant hustling is worthwhile?

How about if your feeling of contentment doesn’t require judgement but simply demands respect as the way things are for you? What a blessed relief. Congratulations.

It’s true that growth is a fundamental human need, but who says that doing what you’re already capable of at work and focusing instead on the interests you have away from work isn’t growth? You can grow in many ways more than developing new skills in the office.

Many years ago, before I trained as a therapist, I worked in the corporate world.

In those days, I’d often sit in traffic on the motorway staring off into the tress and fields and wishing myself amongst them, feelings that were not congruent with the widely peddled idea that it’s important to ‘excel in all areas’ professionally and to keep pushing for advancement.

These days, I spend a good proportion of my time walking through those same trees and fields with my dogs whilst sometimes staring out at the traffic on the motorway, and I can tell you that it is every bit as good as I imagined it would be.

The best perspective from which to engage with motorway traffic.

I have never stopped growing, no matter how much my life has changed, but I have certainly grown in different directions and with much less restriction placed on that growth, rather like an unwieldy honeysuckle unhindered by the boundaries that might have stunted its development.

Growth comes in many forms, and taking on new responsibilities at work, or trying to get the next promotion might motivate some people, but for others there are more pressing aspects of life that take priority. Perhaps that’s just who you are and, if so, trying to force fit yourself into a model of what it is to be a successful human, arbitrarily defined by goodness knows who, probably won’t make you happy.

The easiest person to be is yourself, but it often doesn’t feel like that because that image can sometimes be in conflict with the idea of who you think you are supposed to be.

If you can separate who you are from who you believe you’re expected you to be, you can decide whether you are here to live the life that others think you should live or the life that you want. As far as we can tell, there are no second chances.

Thanks for being here. I appreciate you.