133: Good enough - a philosphy

Every life is, or could be, a series of self-justifications. In previous posts I have written about the good fortune I have had of a good level of earning which has helped me - so far - to provide and support.

But I have also been told by my wife that I should be ashamed of not having had pay rises. One of my motivations to take redundancy some 15 months ago was for the substantial pay-off - which funded 3 new bathrooms, a new kitchen and house decoration.

Where does the feeling of 'good enough' morph into laziness?

An interesting article here.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/12/i-accept-myself-just-as-i-am-the-rise-of-realistic-self-help

Then again, the self-reinvention narrative was always a bit suspect to begin with. For one thing, it’s by no means clear that it’s possible to transform yourself through the simple application of individual willpower: wherever you come down on nature and nurture, it’s undeniable that we owe much of our success or failure in life to our circumstances, and to luck. Then there is the infuriating psychological quirk of “hedonic adaptation”, otherwise known as the happiness treadmill. Succeed in improving your life, and the improvement will soon become part of the backdrop of your days, and thus cease delivering pleasure; to recover that sense of vitality and zest, you’ll have to reinvent yourself again, ad infinitum.

For a while now, that hyperbole has been losing ground to a spirit of anti-utopianism – of accepting yourself as you are, building a good-enough life, or just protecting yourself from the worst of the world outside. 

At the core of Gawdat’s “formula for happiness” is the venerable observation that happiness equals reality minus expectations: in order to feel distress because your life is lacking something, you must first have had some expectation of attaining that thing. (My life lacks a 70ft yacht, but this causes me no suffering, because I never imagined I’d have one.) The argument is not, as progressive critics of self-help sometimes imagine, that disadvantaged people need only stop expecting anything better in order to be content. Some expectations – a reasonable standard of living, healthcare, fulfilling work, social connection – may be entirely rational. But seeing the truth of the formula acts as a kind of sieve, allowing you to separate the handful of things you genuinely want from life from those you’ve been socialised into believing you should want. The latter aren’t worth the pursuit – and if they are the reason you’re trying to invent a “new you”, you’re better off sticking with the old one.

And, of course, there is the danger:

The new crop of anti-perfectionist self-help books are an important counterweight to the conventional message of self-reinvention, which is that there’s no point at which it makes sense to be satisfied with your situation and finally relax, since you could always benefit from acquiring more money, status, education, and so on.