Will ditching your office job make you happy?

Tuesday, 13 August 2019

We're one of the 10 happiest countries on Earth, so what makes us a smile?

This story was first published in August

OPINION: Sometimes I wander through the suburbs in the evenings and peek into living rooms and fantasise about watching telly and bickering with my spouse and buying curtain rails at Bunnings.

These domestic reveries are new and disquieting. The traditional path through life — a steady job, white picket fence, two point three children, monthly mortgage payments —never held much appeal. Now, if I squint my eyes up, I'm starting to see it: not a rut as I originally thought, but a well-worn groove; like settling into an armchair moulded to the exact contours of your butt.

Just me and the monkeys enjoying this ancient step well in Rajasthan, India. But I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Medellín, overlooking the Andes mountains. From the outside, my life is Insta-perfect.

As for me, I'm forging my own path. Enthusiastic onlookers tell me I'm 'living the dream', and technically, I guess that's true.

I used to have an office job at this very publication. It was a great gig, but I got itchy feet. I saw the future rolling out in front of me, a great grey swatch of flannel, comfortable but dull. I was desperate to escape these parochial little islands on the ass-end of the world.

* The World Happiness Report and the science of personal happiness

* How my family and I discovered a life less frowny

* Happiness: Are we happier owning our own home or renting?**

So I saved up my pennies, quit my job, sold all my stuff, broke up with my girlfriend, and flew across the Pacific.

A Kiwi, a Brit and a Dutchwoman walk into the Myanmar mountains.

That was three years ago. I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Medellín, overlooking the Andes mountains. From the outside, my life is Insta-perfect.

Colombia is the latest in an ever-changing line-up of exotic locales: tropical beaches and rice paddies and skyscrapers, oh my! I have total freedom over how I spend my time. It's exactly what I dreamed of during those slow afternoons at the office.

I'm forging my own path. Enthusiastic onlookers tell me I'm 'living the dream', and technically, I guess that's true.

Which is what makes these quotidian fantasies so funny. If you are the slightest bit envious of my life, know that I'm a little envious of yours; and that both of us are doomed to never quite be satisfied.

As far as I can tell, everyone has a baseline level of happiness, and once you have the basics of life covered, that's about as good as it gets. Some of those basic requirements are obvious: safety, a roof over your head, being able to buy shoes for your kids. Others, less so.

After I quit my job, I spent a lot of time lounging on tropical islands, barely moving my carcass from the hammock except to skin up a joint or get another bottle of wine. The only sign of life came from the geckos on the ceiling. Occasionally they licked their eyeballs or caught a moth; this being a source of great excitement to my English friend, who insisted on narrating every scene like a low-rent David Attenborough.

It was around this time I decided that maybe total unconstrained freedom wasn't all it was cracked up to be. On the ninth day of lizard-watching, I stumbled out of the haze of ennui and Cambodian sativa and back into some semblance of a useful human being.

Since then, my life has been a continual process of circling back to the fusty old institutions I'd been trying to escape. These days, I dutifully sit myself down at a desk in a coworking space, with nary a hammock or a coconut in sight. My younger self would be disgusted that I am paying hard-earned money to voluntarily go sit in an office, but it gets worse.

I decided I needed more daily structure, so I played around with a schedule. What it ended up looking like was working in the morning, then doing fun stuff in the evening. You know, kind of like one of those 'nine to five' things. To prevent my time from stretching out into an endless amorphous blob, I also decided to insert a dedicated block of recreation at the end of the week. I'm thinking of calling it a 'week end'.

In other words: I learned the hard way that constraints can be liberating. The French sociologist Emile Durkheim figured this out way back in 1897, after gathering data on suicides from all over Europe. His groundbreaking report found that people who lived alone were most at risk of killing themselves, while those with spouses, families, tight social networks and communal obligations were the happiest and healthiest.

Many of those ties have unravelled since Durkheim's time. The communal structures in which we used to find meaning are crumbling, and the lonely pillar rising in their place—the atomised, self-reliant individual—is looking kind of shaky.

I will always be a relentless booster for personal autonomy. My decision to cut ties and float off untethered has changed my life in all sorts of amazing ways. But I think it's dangerous to fetishise individual freedom over everything else.

Did you know that a lone wolf, far from living a noble and wild existence, has to eat rats and scavenge rotting carcasses to survive? Well, humans are social animals, too. We need hierarchy, and routine, and constraints.

I am happy with the life I've chosen, and extremely grateful for the opportunities I've had. But I've eaten my fair share of rats (metaphorically and literally—Cambodian cuisine is wild) and I have to say: domestication no longer seems like such a terrible fate.

* This article is part of the Good Life Guide, an editorial project sponsored by Skoda. We have produced it independently, to the same standards applied to the rest of our journalism. Read more about our partnership content here