#28: What If Happiness Isn’t the Goal?

Betsy Block (0:00)

Hello, Blooming Solopreneur listeners. It's Betsy Block, and I want to welcome you back to the podcast where we talk about all topics related to starting a business, running a business, the mindset needed to do both, and how to just have a life well lived. I read something in The New York Times last week, and it got me thinking about how people define making it in life. Maybe it's my age combined with my Instagram algorithm, but I am being bombarded with content about what retirement should look like. Lazy days, no pressures, lots of travel. And then I read Mark Edmundson's opinion piece. It's called There's Something Better Than Happiness.

And I got to say, a lot of it resonated for me. I'll link the article in the show notes.

I'd really encourage you to give it a read, and I'd be curious to hear your own takeaways. Basically, Mark's argument is that if we remove all challenge and effort from life, eventually even comfort will get boring.

So I don't agree with his entire premise.

He actually got pretty hammered in the comment section. He's fairly dismissive of pure R&R and simply enjoying a breather from the pressures of day-to-day life. I 100% believe that rest matters, and doing nothing matters. A lot of us, or I'll speak for myself, I'm just flat out exhausted at times from balancing work and side business, raising my kids, managing my finances, dealing with the rising cost of living. Not every minute of our lives needs to be productive and purposeful. I will add that the doing nothing mode, that is a personal struggle for me, and I've had to work hard to allow myself to just chill out. Something about my upbringing has made me, fortunately or unfortunately, tie my value to my output. But that's a topic for another day. Honestly though, I love a beach chair, I crave naps, I am here for just staring out the window and puttering in the garden and letting an afternoon unfold without a thing to show for it. But, and here's the big but, I also know that some of the times I've felt most excited about life haven't necessarily been the times I'm the most comfortable. They've often come from being absorbed by something I'm learning, whether that's a new technology or how to edit a reel, how to start flowers from seed, figuring out how to send an invoice through QuickBooks. I call this productive discomfort. It's actually a good kind of discomfort. It's the kind that comes from stretching myself, doing something that can be frustrating, difficult, even embarrassing at times. But it also makes me feel energized and capable. I think there's a difference between being comfortable and being engaged. And maybe one of the great opportunities at this midlife stage of life is recognizing that we don't need to spend the rest of our lives simply optimizing for comfort. Starting a small business or a side hustle and all of the challenges and learnings that come with it, these are great examples of productive discomfort. I have spent plenty of evenings trying to figure out how to tweak my website, price or adjust the pricing of my services, map out the timeline of a corporate team building event. Are all those tasks pleasurable?

Absolutely not. But building something that's all mine, something I can tweak and pivot, lean into or feather back as my life changes, I find that satisfying in a very deep way.

I'd also say there's a distinction between pleasure and fulfillment. Take a minute, think about these two categories of activities. So one, things that feel good when you're doing them, and two, things that make you feel good about your life. There's overlap between the two for sure, but they are not identical. Binging a great show on Netflix, that might be pleasurable, but finishing something you've been working on over a lengthy stretch of time, that might feel fulfilling. A leisurely morning with coffee and a book, I did that this morning, that made me feel happy. But delivering meals to shut-ins, that would likely give more meaning to my day. Scrolling on Instagram, that's easy. That feels great in the moment. But learning something brand new, that's hard. But the sense of mastery afterward can give you a sustained level of confidence. I'd say neither category is better or worse than the other. There's no hierarchy as to how we should spend our time. But I do think a rich, a full life, it has bits of both, the pleasure and the purpose. Again, at this stage of life, 61, approaching that traditional age of retirement, this is really on my mind. There's a real cultural story, at least in the United States, around retirement and what I'll call later adulthood. It says, you've worked hard, now you get to relax.