An Interesting Life Rather Than a Happy One

We typically assume that the ultimate aim of all our efforts is to have a happy life. And judged on this basis, many of us have to admit – in the silence of our minds – that we are not really doing very well. There is so much that – every year, and perhaps almost every day – comes along to spoil our ambitions: there is a power struggle at the office, there’s a problem in our families, our friends feel superficial or disengaged, our anxieties don’t abate and our relationships are scratchy or distant. Our difficulties generate a basic layer of misery, but a secondary layer is then swiftly added to it – caused by an underlying sense that our unhappiness represents a fundamental violation of life’s true purpose. Not only are we unhappy, we are unhappy that we are unhappy – in the light of our tightly-held belief in the possibility of a state of enduring satisfaction. We are both sad and crushed that we have failed at the single-most important goal open to all sane and ambitious humans.

It is in such moments of knotted misery that we may gain some relief from reframing our situation. While we may not be able to overcome our burdens themselves, it does lie in our power to alter what these burdens have to mean to us. We may not have to take them as proof of our stupidity or ill-adjustment, they can be signs that we are destined to have interesting lives rather than calm ones, lives marked by a high degree of exploration, psychological understanding, and striving rather than settled certainty and equilibrium. What we lack in terms of contentment, we may make up for in terms of insight and experience.

We, the often troubled ones, the typically anxious ones, the ones who frequently reach the end of a day as exhausted and shaken as if we had crossed mountains, might judge our complicated situations with a new rueful kind of pride. We belong to a distinctive and in its way estimable cohort. We are always going to find a cloud on our horizons, we’ll never spend more than half an hour before being visited by some kind of distemper, we are never going to accept things as they are or make totally wise choices around love or work. But this doesn’t perhaps have to be the measure of everything. We don’t need to be constantly offended by our agitations. Our day to day troubles don’t have to be the yardstick by which we judge the value of our lives. Given where we have come from and how we are constituted, we were never going to be ‘happy’ in any obvious way. 

But perhaps a good life can in the end be compatible with being fairly perturbed most days of the week. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that a relationship has failed once more. Perhaps it isn’t appalling that our business doesn’t deliver us the returns we might have had in our old job. We have stretched ourselves, we have learnt to raise our voices, we have developed courage. We don’t have to see marks of grief and trouble as some kind of a violation of a pristine contract but as the logical and immovable consequences of our stubborn and subtle natures interacting with the complexities of existence. 

We are sometimes frightened into reorienting our lives by being asked to contemplate how we might feel about them from the vantage point of our death beds. But if on this bed, we were to look back at a roller coaster of emotions and events (we might have got married for the fifth time recently), we might smile to ourselves and – to the beeping of the heart monitor beside us – say, with wisdom and compassion, it wasn’t a calm life for sure, it wasn’t for the most part even a happy one but heaven knows it was a truly and properly interesting one. And with this as our measure, we might meet our end with all the satisfaction and self-acceptance we could hope for.