Your most valuable moments might look like nothing at all

In the race to optimise, we risk trampling over the most precious bits of our existence, and miss opportunities to feel satisfied.

An environment in which you might feel surprisingly content

I’m at an NHS health check sitting in the consulting room and trying not to glance at the pillow and tourniquet on the table next to me, an ominous looking needle lying by it’s side.

‘We’ll just do your blood pressure first, if you can roll up your sleeve.’

‘I’m not great with anything blood related,’ I tell her, aware that I am drastically underplaying the issue.

While she’s fiddling around in a drawer for a finger prick test, the cuff tightens on my arm, I become aware of my pulse and start to feel faint. Just in time, the cuff deflates.

She looks at the reading and frowns.

‘I’ll just take another one,’ she says.

Despite my status as a fully paid up member of ‘white coat syndrome’, as I get older, enthusiasm to optimise my health in order to give myself as much time alive as I can, seems to increase.

When the clinician told me that walking 50km a week didn’t have much impact on my exercise score because it wasn’t necessarily getting my heart rate up, I felt disappointed, and countered,

‘It does when I’m walking uphill.’

She continued to stare at her screen, saying nothing.

I wanted to tell her that my smart scale scores my metabolic age at three years less than my actual age, even though my actual age is a more reliable source of reality than my smart scale.

Before I started writing this piece, I didn’t even realise I had such a tendency toward optimisation. Measurement has become so ubiquitous in our lives, it’s easy to miss the moments when we fall naturally into it, defending ourselves from the admonishment of a future self that will probably never exist and may never need to.

There is, these days, a palpable pushback against optimisation culture, which seems like a good thing, but it makes me wonder what it is about measurement and constant improvement we find so alluring, instead of simply enjoying what we already have.

On a walk with the dogs through the woods, the gathering clouds threaten to unleash their worst on us at any moment, which will be our second soaking of the day.

‘We’re lucky it’s June,’ I tell the dogs, ‘The canopy of the trees is so thick we can probably avoid the worst of it.’

Neither of them seemed all that interested. Nelly is stalking a squirrel and Daisy is more invested in sniffing the piss on a large fern.

Left to my own thoughts, a familiar feeling falls across me, one I can only describe as a consciousness of being more alright than I’d realised, perhaps completely content, even though the very notion still feels alien, as if it ought to be elusive.

I make an impromptu itinerary in my head.

‘I’m out in nature with my two furry best friends in the world. I feel comfortably warm, I’m well fed. The sun is shining through the trees and making a beautiful dappled light on the path. There’s nobody else around, and I have no commitments this afternoon with the freedom to do exactly as I please. I’ve got everything I could want.’

There’s a fragility to noticing the seismic perfection of a moment, because doing so feels as if it’s the very thing that threatens to destroy it. Like only being able to walk in fresh snow once before it’s ruined, and really wanting to be the one that does it but also really wanting it to stay like it is.

And yet, it can be hard to believe that there isn’t something slightly further ahead to make things even better.

The image comes to mind of a donkey moving steadily forward, motivated by a carrot that dangles from a stick. The promise of ultimate success no more than an illusion, and robbing today by making unsubstantiated claims about tomorrow.

This is ‘Bella’ (not the one smoking the pipe, that’s the vicar). It’s the only photo I have of a donkey

It’s precisely the understated nature of being satisfied that makes it so hard to pin down.

A moment of contentment is often at its most powerful when there is nothing much happening. A bean eaten straight from its stalk, a flash of colour as a yellowhammer flies between trees, or a gentle walk with a couple of dogs without demand on your time.

These are not moments that can be shared on social media, and they can’t be measured or logged, which perhaps explains why optimisation has become so popular.

How do we know that we’re living a good life? It might feel easier to judge if we measure our exercise, the weight we can lift, the money we earn, the sleep we’re getting, our screen time and to-do lists, but optimisation, by it’s very nature, is about a future self, a moment we cannot live in because it hasn’t arrived. All the time we spend thinking about how we can improve into the future we are ignorant of what’s happening right now.

In therapy, when people are in emotional crisis, they understandably ask ‘What do I need to do to stop feeling this way?’ and the paradoxical answer they least want to hear is, ‘You have to stop wanting the feelings to stop in order that they do.’

The gradual realisation that one can be stable in idleness is often cause for suspicion too. ‘I was on my own today, not doing anything, and I felt OK,’ they might say with surprise. This mistrust is odd really, when you think that this is essentially how we came into the world and will one day leave it. It’s the original default state.

When it comes to emotions, we may not realise that we are trying to optimise them, but we do.

Who doesn’t feel comfortable with happiness, joy, or excitement? They represent a success of sorts, and success means we’re moving forward. Positive emotion feels like we’re optimising.

Uncomfortable emotions like sadness, fear or frustration can frequently feel like failure, as if we’re getting life ‘wrong’. People often tell me that allowing themselves to stay in negative emotion is ‘wasting time’, but this is to misunderstand emotion.

Emotions don’t exist for utility anymore than the weather does. They needn’t be seen as a call to action. Instead, it is in our courageous enduring of them, even when they are painful, that makes us whole and creates the foundation from which it is possible to really live.

We chase improvement and reject stasis, push away discomfort and crave relief, but in so doing we remove ourselves from experiencing the actual life that we are presented with, right now, the only story there is.

In his book ‘The Burnout Society’, philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out the negative impacts of what he calls ‘the achievement society’, identifying a constant thirst for optimisation as the cause of exhaustion, disconnection, and the loss of the very contentment achievement was designed to deliver in the first place.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become increasingly drawn toward spending time gardening, a pursuit Han describes as, ‘silent meditation, a lingering stillness’.

At first, I noticed my impatience at the time it took for a plant to grow, so I’d buy bigger plants to avoid the seemingly interminable wait for them to turn into something recognisable, but the payoff was never quite the same as having grown something from seed and tended it through the changing weeks and months until it fruited or flowered.

I think this is one of the reasons that time spent in nature can be so powerful. It won’t be rushed, but it is consistent, familiar and somewhat predictable. It resists measurement and does it’s own thing anyway, regardless of how you feel about it, a lesson many of us could learn and benefit from.

I can frantically count the lettuces I’ve grown that survive an onslaught from the slugs and snails, and then calculate the ratio of seeds sown to harvest rates, or I can enjoy eating the ones that are left. It’s always a choice.

The memorable year I managed to grow a puppy in the raised beds.

A few years ago, I had surgery to repair a detached retina.

The operation required a number of follow up visits to London to see the specialist until I was finally ready to be discharged.

In my final conversation with my consultant I asked her,

‘Is there anything I should be doing to avoid the likelihood of anything happening again in the future?’

‘Just go and live your life,’ is what she told me, flat batting my unnecessary attempts to optimise and reminding me of the importance of enjoying what I already have.

Back home, after my traumatic experience at the health check, I get a text message with my scores from the test. Encouraged that my cholesterol levels are healthily low, I celebrate by eating a family-sized bag of crisps.

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‘Sideways’ is back on Thursday with an episode on the topic of ‘Compassion fatigue’. There’ll also be the usual tomfoolery. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for being here, I appreciate you.