Happiness Is Not Forever.

I recently started seeing more and more grey colours around me. And that is never good. I remember the years when I was between 14 and 25 years old, and it was all that grey.

So I started analyzing: what is happening? Where is this coming from?

As always, it comes from a combination of a few factors. So, I started listing all the things that went wrong. 

Why Do I Feel So Isolated Among People?

First of all, despite being around people, I have a profound feeling of isolation.

According to Holt-Lunstad et al. (2015), loneliness and social isolation raise mortality risk by roughly a quarter to a third. And this is not just an outcome of a fact that in this job, you need to sit in front of your computer for long hours every day. It is also an outcome of a fact that you struggle with any issues completely on your own. 

There is a lot of pressure. And a recipe for a disaster in case your project puts 100% focus on solving a problem that might just have no solution. In general, most PhDs have the same feeling of isolation.

But the question is: where is the healthy boundary, and when to say stop? Especially if you have no private life at the same time. 

How Does Living Abroad Wear You Down?

Furthermore, I am a landlady in my household, which is a different relationship than being just housemates to people. It is friendly, but it is also much more formal.

And you should not complain or confess about every single problem you have to the folks around you. The consequence is that wherever you go, even if you just go home, you have no intimacy at all.

Yet another issue is the fatigue coming from the bare fact that after living in a foreign country for five years. And still notice clear cultural differences that sometimes make my life miserable. I treat my time differently than the Dutch people, and my ways of approaching others are just different. 

I was emotionally involved in just one relationship before. So, I never managed to grow the skin thick enough for as ambivalent and uncertain relations with people as they are in Dutch society. 

In addition to all of that, I am partially guilty of this bad mood of not taking enough care of myself. Not enough sleep, not enough laughter, not enough good food… and over a few months, bad health is almost guaranteed.

What Does My Personal Maslow’s Pyramid Look Like?

I also started thinking of what my personal Maslow’s pyramid looks like. According to Maslow (1943), once we reasonably meet our more basic needs, higher-level needs like esteem and respect move to the front of the queue and start driving our behavior instead. I figured that there are many more important needs to me than to be loved or even liked, than an abundance of good food or a comfortable bed.

Being respected is an example. I also learned that happiness does not last forever. 

You can put yourself together and fool yourself that happy times are for good. But in fact, the feeling of happiness will vanish away with time if you do not take care of it properly. It is just like a plant that needs watering every day.

According to Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman (1978), even lottery winners drift back to their baseline happiness.

According to Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade (2005), ongoing, effortful activities, rather than circumstances, shape roughly half of our happiness. So it tends to fade back down unless we actively maintain it.

This might sound like a truism, but somehow I keep on forgetting about it. Time to dance.