This post is late this year I know – it’s a whole new month tomorrow. Before I start though I just want to thank you for all of the fabulous book recommendations last week – my Kindle floweth over – and for the enthusiastic response to the survey. As I explained last week I’ve approached January quite differently this year, I haven’t felt my usual need to get everything pinned down. Something’s afoot and I suspect I might finally be in transition from the midlife hiatus of feeling suspended between the two acts of the first half of life and the second. We’ve talked about that a lot on here over the years, about the strange limbo you often find yourself in during your 50s where you aren’t quite sure who you are now – perhaps because your children have moved on or your working life is changing or because menopause makes you feel like somebody you’re not quite familiar with. The hiatus is there to give us a chance to pause and adjust. I feel as if I’ve been readying myself for The Second Act for a while, trying out different things in attempt to work out where a new kind of happiness lies, especially since the boys moved into their adult lives. So I’m going to spend the next two posts reflecting on 2024’s midlife lessons but also on conclusions that have taken longer to come to – about how to live as happily as possible at this stage of life.
Flow
I think the first time I ever read a book on the topic of happiness was back in 2007. I remember it well because it introduced me to the concept of ‘flow’ which is the importance of losing yourself in something on a regular basis. It can be a state of free-flowing thinking or a hobby, anything enjoyable that causes you to lose track of time, stopping you from thinking actively and instead letting your mind drift. Since I discovered it I’ve made a point of incorporating it into my days whenever I can. I actually go into flow when I’m drying my hair and some of my best ideas pop up during those fifteen minutes of going into a dreamy daze. Since then I’ve read lots of other books about happiness and in addition to flow they all tend to share a similar premise which I’m sure you’ll be familiar with but it never hurts to have a ‘meaning of life’ recap so I’ll summarise them here:
Meaning, purpose & earned status
Once our fundamental needs (food, shelter etc) have been met, happiness comes from meaning and purpose. Modern life conditions us to look for it in the acquisition of things but it can only fleetingly be found there. You need to know who you truly are and what you stand for. And then you need to earn your status as that person – and by status I mean having intrinsic values that you know you live up to. True status is earned from time spent on loving and caring for other people… the sharing of your wisdom or talent… the gift of your time, paid or unpaid. One of the saddest things about today’s society is the belief that status can be bought – that the car you drive, the bag you carry or the club that you belong to says something about you. It may indicate that you have more money than other people but it says nothing about you yourself… other than how you spend that money… and that you’re somebody who believes that the car you drive can somehow make you better than everyone else on the road.
The hedonic treadmill
This whole thing about buying stuff in the belief that it will somehow give us status and thereby make us happy is such an empty and yet prolific promise that it’s one of the key causes of unhappiness. The problem is that over the last ten years in particular lots of us have found ourselves driven to pound even harder on the hedonic treadmill, working constantly to earn enough money to buy the next thing… because we’re told that the next thing is the one that will finally make us happy. But with every new purchase comes hedonic adaptation – within a week or two of having the new thing we become used to it… and now it’s that old thing and we need to work hard again to buy the next one… because that’s the one that will take us over the threshold to utopia.
Wanting more has been the drive that has taken us from a neanderthal state to the evolved society that we live in now. Without it we wouldn’t have discovered the wheel or the steam engine or the washing machine – the human drive for more isn’t always motivated by greed. However the advertising industry started learning how to provoke it from a consumerist perspective back at the beginning of the 20th century. At least then it was passive though, it could only catch us if we looked. With the advent of social media, cookies and algorithms, brands have been able to get inside our heads and ensure that something we mentioned to a friend over coffee suddenly starts appearing in front of our eyes when we look at our screens and is only a click away from arriving at our door.
And it’s clever. When you study marketing the most basic principle you’re taught is to find the consumer’s pain, highlight it and then offer a solution for it. So, for example, if you’re a beauty brand targeting midlife women the first thing you’re going to do is make them fear the visible effects of ageing and imply that your new cream will wipe them away. Traditionally as a fashion brand you’d hint that what a woman was wearing was last season and made her look frumpy, suggesting that instead of the style that she knew suited her, she could only wear the new one if she wanted to stay in the game. I bet if you make a point of analysing the next few ads you see you’ll be able to spot the originating trigger – consumer pain.
As human beings with a tribal drive to belong we fall for it all of the time and so we keep pounding the hedonistic treadmill, working and striving for more of everything purely because of the high we believe it will give us. Because I’ve worked in retail marketing all my life I have a certain immunity to a lot of this from a product perspective. When I see a brand targeting me I’ll always deconstruct their approach from a strategic point of view which takes the witchcraft out of it. However, I can still fall for it on other levels. Last year I bought fewer things than ever but I fell into a new spend trap which is based around the experiential – it’s something we see the generation below us focusing on. And in the end the biggest of 2024’s midlife lessons for me was that even the experiential can fall prey to hedonic adaptation.
2024’s midlife lessons – a year of hedonic adaptation
You may remember that we made a decision last January (partly by choice, partly in acknowledgement of the retail downturn) to work less and earn less for a year. It meant we had to rein in our spending and the biggest change we made was in drastically cutting down our international travel. Other than a promised visit to go over and share the youngest’s new life in Spain for a week and then our ten days in Turkey in October, we spent all of our time and budget in the UK. As you know, I’m never not strategic about things and so I decided to make a project out of it. We’d noticed that every single time we reviewed a year that had gone, our local three day festival was always in our top three best times. The problem was that when it was over we had a whole year to wait for the next one and so I made it my mission to find more and 2024 became a year of experimenting with music events.
So once again, being never not strategic about these things, I decided that in order to understand what we loved the most, we needed to evaluate as many as we could. And I found that the UK just has so many brilliant events to offer over the summer months that before I knew it I’d planned something in for almost every other weekend. We started on a huge high with our usual festival at the beginning of May and we were overjoyed at the end of it knowing that for once it was only the warm-up.
Soon afterwards we embraced Day Fever… Madness at Newcastle Races… Margate Funk & Soul Festival… Brutus Gold in Leeds… Sophie Ellis-Bextor… Horse Meat Disco… on it went until we reached the zenith of Jungle in Halifax …and it started to feel like a magical merry go round… that was spinning too fast. Suddenly instead of looking forward to things we were complaining about packing our bags for another night away, it all started to feel like a big effort rather than a joyful pleasure. By the time we’d done more Day Fever, DJ Paulette and hit the rain sodden Radio 2 In The Park we felt as if we never wanted to dance or sing again.
Our greatest pleasure had lost all of its glow. And that’s hedonic adaptation. It seems so obvious when I write it here but 2024 taught me that the extraordinary is only magical if you don’t allow it to become ordinary – which is what I did.
Lottery winners aren’t as happy as you’d think
You see the same outcome when you look into research on the lottery. People’s biggest lottery win dream (after paying off debts and endowing close family) is to travel whenever and wherever they want. And yet when you study interviews with actual winners they so often say that it was their biggest disappointment. Because when you have everything easily at your feet it means nothing. My experience last summer was a micro-version of that – thank goodness I didn’t win the lottery I suppose!
By the way, while we’re on the subject of winning the lottery did you know that a study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman measured the happiness outcome of a group of lottery winners against a control group of non-winners? They discovered that a year on from their prize, the winners were only fractionally happier than the non-winners with a score of 4 out of 5 versus 3.8. In the paper’s summary they concluded that ‘eventually the thrill of winning the lottery will itself wear off… even the most positive events will cease to have impact.’
They went on to compare the lottery winners with a group of accident survivors who’d been left paraplegic by their injuries. Everyone in the study was asked to score the pleasure they got from simple, everyday activities such as watching TV or chatting to a friend. It’s astounding to read that the accident survivors came up with a higher score and in the same test, so did the non-winners. It shows that the capacity to buy more comes with the loss of enjoyment of the simple pleasures in life as well as the luxury purchases.
Hedonic adaptation really doesn’t do us any favours. On the same lines Professor Sonja Lyubomyrsky (author of The How of Happiness) found that two thirds of the benefit of a pay-rise vanishes after a year because spending habits soon rise accordingly and swallow it up. Her studies show that as people earn more they also start to socialise with others in a higher income bracket and so there is more peer-related jostling (keeping up with the Joneses). “We get used to – and even addicted to a higher standard of living,” she says. Suddenly the things and people that used to make us happy don’t feel good enough. Maybe I should thank the retail downturn for making sure I can’t fall into that trap!
The ordinary & the extraordinary
So 2024’s midlife lessons for me lie in avoiding hedonic adaptation by keeping special things special. In the same way that 20-somethings overuse superlatives calling everything ‘amazing’ or ‘awesome’, I overused the extraordinary and rendered it ordinary. However I see my experience as great news because it makes life in the future far less expensive. I now know exactly what kind of music event I’ll get the most pleasure from so I’ll only book the right things this year. And I really will try to restrict myself to one a month both for my own energy levels and because our commitments in Newcastle are growing so we have to spend more time there.
The counterbalance to my new understanding of the extraordinary has been my recent embrace of everything ordinary. I’ve realised that if I want to keep the big events special, I have to spot the pleasure in the everyday life that lies between them. And that brings me back to the glimmers that we talked about in my first post of the year. I’ve gone back to the drill that I used to have each night over dinner when the boys were at home of sharing the best and worst moments of the day. The middle one’s finding it helpful too because he’s working hard to save enough to travel later this year. His job isn’t rewarding but best/worst reminds him that every day has its moments. And for our wedding anniversary in a couple of week’s time Mal and I have a jar ready, we’re each going to start writing our highlight of the week on a piece of paper every Sunday night so that on our next anniversary (which will be our silver wedding) we can go through them and see where the true pleasures lie.
Heading towards The Second Act
All of this is, you see, gearing up for The Second Act. I’ve seen so many people retire and feel lost for a while – by the time I get there (no time soon!) I want to have a clear picture of how I want to spend those precious years. 2024 showed me that it can’t all be about the distractions of the extraordinary… world cruises and lunch out every day… those things will soon lose their gloss if they aren’t padded out with the ordinary. The Second Act will require some focus on simple times, sometimes spent alone. And there’s no point in any of us imagining that we’re suddenly going to become a different person, we need to know who we are beyond any work titles that might have given us status. So in the interim it’s a case of getting to grips with your ‘self’ – you’re going take your self with you wherever you go, whatever you do – and so that self needs to know how to be as happy as it can or it won’t be very good company.
When I read this back it all sounds so obvious that I’m almost tempted not to publish it but it’s been an important lesson for me so I hope it might chime with at least some of you. My next bit of retrospective concerns travel – how did it feel to be more UK based after the last couple of years when our project has been about exploring lots of different types of overseas holidays? Well I have conclusions on that too but they’ll have to wait until next week. In the meantime I look forward to hearing from everyone who has thoughts on this but particularly those of you who feel you’re in your Second Act. How did you adjust and do you feel you’ve found a balance? If you’re just starting to think about it all like me how’s the planning going – or are you just going to work it all out when you get there? See you next week.
Disclosure: ‘Reflecting on 2024’s midlife lessons’ is not a sponsored post
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