if you're so smart, why aren't you happy?

the most important thing I've learned in my life

Not to get too conceptual and theoretical on here, but it is fall, and the leaves are falling, so… someone’s got to set the mood?

Dear reader, I appreciate you a whole lot for being here. And for that reason, I want to share a train of thought that’s been incredibly beneficial to me lately, and has sort of shaped me as a person.

Let’s start here: I see myself as a truly happy person. I find joy in so much, and it overwhelms me; I’ve been absolutely happy –even through some moments so hard that they were laughable– for maybe around six years. Happiness has not always come easy to me, far from it. At 14 I couldn’t imagine myself living past 25. I’m almost 25 now and I’m so happy. To me, happiness is success: if I feel happy, I have succeeded in creating a life for myself that enables that. Happiness and success are woven tightly together into one big tapestry. Are you ever successful (by any metric) if you aren’t actually happy? Or as one of my favorite quotes reads, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?

The prevailing discourse when I was younger was that smart people are inevitably sad. They’re sad because they’re smart enough to know difficulties will always be around the corner; they know life is always hard, their eyes are too open, they wear their cynicism on their sleeves as a mark of intelligence. This type of discourse makes me roll my eyes, like it was born by pessimistic philosophers and fuelled by 2014 Tumblr and now held as gospel for cynics everywhere to comfortably look down on happy people and sit calmly in their knowledge that unfortunately, that could just never be me. I’m a recovering sad-person-who-thought-they-were-too-smart-to-be-happy, and thankfully I can now see clearly enough. And quite frankly, the sun shines a lot more warmly here.

I’ve written a lot about my thoughts on optimism vs cynicism and pessimism before so I won’t focus so much on that discussion here, but if you’re interested, here’s a stance. Today I’ll simply focus on the thought that if you’re so smart, you can be happy. (Note: I’ll exclude mental health conditions like depression from this discussion and focus on the average person and average state of mind).

I don’t know how you define happiness and I don’t think we’re clear enough as a consensus about its DNA. To me it’s this: if I feel happy (satisfied, content, at peace) most days, then I am happy. I can sleep peacefully at night, I have love around me, and I know how to spend a day to make it as joyful and enjoyable as I can. Happiness is built by you, and it’s built by self-awareness. Things that make you feel inspired, fulfilled, and excited, are things that make you tick; your job is to find a way to incorporate them into your everyday life as much as you can. Because happiness is not a state you reach once you hit a specific milestone, it is an accumulation of everyday moments of contentment.

Substack sees a lot of talk around romanticising your life, and that’s a big point here. Romanticising everyday moments simply means being able to find joy and magic in the mundane- that’s an incredible skill for creating a happy existence, as long as it comes from an authentic place. Don’t ‘romanticise’ your morning walk to create content for an Instagram story. Create moments of contentment, situations that engage you or quiet your mind, because they genuinely do, not for others to perceive them. If you free yourself from doing anything with the goal of external perception then you’ll be acting in alignment with what actually fuels your soul, and discovering what types of situations you can create every day to give yourself real moments of happiness. Don’t forget that this is your life – being “too smart to be happy” is not a flex, we can stop pretending it is. Being smart equals being able to give yourself what you need and what you want, and happiness starts from every day. Daily moments are within your reach; how you spend your days is how you spend your life. If you spend your days doing things that make you happy, small things that make you feel inspired or engaged or joyful in the moment, that is the sum of your life.

It’s fall now, and London is starting to look like it. That makes me unreasonably excited. With every season come different opportunities to romanticise everyday moments and get in a different mood. In the fall I’ll bring excitement to my week by hosting dinner parties for friends, walking in the park with a hot drink early in the morning (have you seen London parks when the trees turn orange???), watching movies where it’s autumn in New York (too good), defrosting my 40-hour (I know) jazz playlist. In the summer I found joy in reading in the sun, eating outside at night, catching up with friends by a river or a lake. The secret is in getting yourself in the mood.

I think this is why we see a lot of Gen Z talking about how real luxury is no longer expensive cars and fancy titles, but rather having the freedom to choose what you do and how you spend your time, cultivating love around you, engaging with your passions and creativity, and experiencing moments of genuine contentment. We’re shifting the discourse to a much more fruitful one and I think that’s great. In a way, it’s all much simpler than you’d think.