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Why the Long Face?

General Unhappiness

It’s 9am on a Monday morning. The sky is a threatening mix of greys. The wind has slammed every door in the house, taken the lid off the bin, thrown it down the street, and is now attempting to wrestle the trees to the ground. Meanwhile the rain is pounding against the window like it’s trying to get in. It’s not what you need right now, and none of it is doing anything to soothe your hangover. Or is it a headache? Either way, your head pounds as if your skull is slowly being crushed in a vice, and all you can do to ease the pain is rub your eyes – eyes that feel like someone rolled them in chalk dust whilst you slept. All you have to do is make it till lunchtime, and then – maybe – you can sneak out to the car and get your head down for 15 minutes.

Except that it’s not Monday morning. It’s Wednesday afternoon. On a balmy spring day. The sky’s finally realised that when it comes to clouds, less is most definitely more. The only wind is a gentle breeze that carries the sounds of the children from the school opposite. It’s only Monday morning inside your head.

But that’s how you feel all the time. Or most of the time. Enough that it bugs you. Enough that you picked up a book on happiness.

And it’s how I used to feel.

Right now, as I write this book, I estimate 92% of my life was spent being ‘unhappy’.1 Not in an ‘active’ way, just – you know – a bit fed up with life. I had my share of moments where I stared at the cards life had dealt me and wondered how it was possible that there wasn’t a single ace or picture card in my hand. I was ‘a bit disappointed with it all’. There was a general lack of happiness in my days. I was un-happy.

In other words, I was, and very occasionally still am, pretty much like you, and most of the people we know. One of my closest friends once described it like this: ‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘living the life I would have chosen for myself.’

So what’s the cause?

Obviously there are numerous reasons. Therapists, psychologists and sociologists can probably carve them up and categorise them in numerous ways, but there are just three that seem right to me.

Let’s take a closer look at General Unhappiness.

Cause Number 1: Lousy Work/Life Balance

According to ‘popular wisdom’, no one lies on their death bed and thinks to themselves, ‘I really wish I’d spent more time at work.’

Or do they?

Perhaps, out there, there’s some lucky fellow who has, or had, this amazing job, and they either did, or are likely to, lie on their death bed and wish they’d spent more time in the office. Who could that person be?

Let’s consider some possible candidates:

CONTESTANT NUMBER 1:

TOM HANKS

A-LIST HOLLYWOOD ACTOR

You know, I bet even Mr Hanks gets fed up with being an A-list Hollywood Actor. It’s not all glitz, you know. For one thing, there’s the paparazzi, constantly hounding Britney Spears and ignoring Tom. What exactly does an A-list actor have to do to get his picture on the front of a few magazines these days? Where’s the respect? What happened to the days when raw talent was enough to get you noticed? Nowadays those press guys are only interested in shoving a camera in your face when you’re face down in a puddle of something foul.

Will Tom be wishing he spent more time at work when the time comes to visit the big awards ceremony in the sky? Not a chance.

CONTESTANT NUMBER 2:

BILL GATES

CREATOR OF MICROSOFT

Being the second richest man on the planet2 must be quite a buzz.

Thing is though, even if Bill decided to phone in sick, and to lie in bed for the rest of his life, he’d still be amongst the richest people that have ever lived – he doesn’t actually have to work at it any more.

Now he might lie on his death bed and have regrets about Windows 95, Windows Vista, and Office 2007 – as well he should – but that would be a desire to atone for his crimes to humanity. In many ways those heinous errors of judgement might have actually been avoided if Bill had stayed at home once in a while. So when the time comes and Dr Watson walks into the room to tell Bill that there’s been an unexpected error in his Life and it needs to Shut Down, will he wish he’d spent more time at the office?

No.

Next.

CONTESTANT NUMBER 3:

JULIO CASI AMOREO

WORLD’S GREATEST LOVER,

MALE ESCORT &

FIGMENT OF PETER JONES’S IMAGINATION

Maybe there’s someone out there who gets paid to make love to the world’s most fabulously gorgeous women. (What? It could happen!)

On his death bed in his villa, somewhere in southern Italy, surrounded by beautiful, grief-stricken lovers, Julio looks around him and, as a gentle breeze wafts in through the window and plays with his hair, he realises that even though he was managing three or four ladies, every day, for the past twenty years, he still failed to get to them all.

Maybe Julio will wish he’d worked more.

Well done. We thought of someone. Though we had to make him up. And you and I are probably in the minority for believing such a job can be described as ‘work’.

Actually, it occurs to me that we probably need to take a moment to define what ‘work’ is.

This isn’t the dictionary definition, but it’s one that feels right to me:

Work is:

 Anything you have to do (be that earning money, picking the kids up from school, paying bills, sorting through your post, chores, family commitments …)

 Doing whatever it is you need to do to sustain your life (earning money, robbing banks, living off the land …)

And, this being the case, here are some interesting things I’ve noticed about ‘work’:

 Most of us are conditioned to believe that we must work. (Sure, many of us have to work, to earn money for food, clothes, and to keep a home running – but the conditioning is actually a belief that we must work, and that we’re lazy, or stupid, or not pulling our weight if we don’t.)

 Work tends to fill the space available.

 Some bright spark decided that the average working week should be five days out of seven. Five out of seven!

This being the case it’s ridiculously easy to end up with a situation where work totally dominates your life. Where it’s virtually the only thing you do during waking hours.

Try this simple exercise:

Taking no more than thirty seconds, think of three things you did in the last twenty-four hours that don’t fall under my definition of ‘work’.

So, you’re done? What were your three things?

Were they …

1 eating,

2 watching TV, and

3 sleeping?

If you had something better on your list (I’ll let you off if you ‘went out for dinner’) did it take you more than thirty seconds to come up with your list?

Now, I’m not suggesting for one moment that work isn’t necessary and is somehow a bad thing. I’m not proposing that we eliminate work. Work is necessary. But for most people the balance of work and ‘everything else’ in their life is all wrong. And in many cases the ‘everything else’ lacks substance.

Reader ‘Anon’ emailed me:

‘I’m sure a lot of us are in a job we don’t enjoy for one reason or another, and let’s face it, the recession has left us well and truly stuck – it seems far too scary to leave the secure job we have, even if it does make us miserable! I was wondering if you had any practical tips on how to survive doing things which make us unhappy but that we HAVE TO do? Is there a way of finding happiness in a job when we can’t stand our work colleagues or are treated badly by the powers above? Thanks Peter.’

‘Dear Anon,

Not that long ago I used to work in the banking industry. I spent my days telling rich men how to get richer by making poor people poorer. I used to leave the house in the morning and make some passing quip to my wife about how I was off to torture some souls. She’d ask me if I’d forgotten my pitch fork and horns. Like so many things said in jest, it wasn’t actually very funny.

Finally, two years ago I couldn’t take it any more. I went back to see the therapist who helped me through the loss of my wife, and six months later I finally summoned the courage to leave the security of a regular pay cheque behind.

Financially it’s been a tough few months. And as I write this now I’m not quite out of the woods. My outgoings still outweigh my income but ... I have a plan. If things keep going the way they have been I should be supporting myself as a full-time author by the end of the year.

So my dear Anon, whoever you may be, it can be done. You can change your life. I don’t believe in rash decisions, or risking everything ... but life’s too short not to try.

‘Survival’ shouldn’t be your first option.

Best wishes,

Peter.

If, like Anon, ‘work’ has become something you feel you need to ‘survive’, there are three obvious ways to improve your work-life balance:

1 Work less

2 Improve the non-work portion of your life

3 Make work fun (which might involve changing the very nature of what ‘work’ is)

I’ve tried – and am still trying – all three approaches. Maybe you instinctively know that one or all of these might work for you, but try not to get fixated on that right now. Keep that thought in the back of your mind, or better still, jot it on a piece of paper. We’ll come back to it later.

In the meantime let’s move on to the second reason for General Unhappiness.

Cause Number 2: Lack of Control

Run down the following list and keep a count in your head of the number of times you say, ‘Yes, that applies to me.’

1 Other people have a say in how your life works.

2 Everyone else gets a say in how your life works.

3 You feel powerless a lot of the time.

4 Everyone, and everything else, comes first.

5 You say things like ‘I can’t do {what I want}, because I’ve got to do …’

6 What you want (to do) is right at the bottom of your to-do list.

7 Your to-do list is mainly a list of items given to you by someone else.

8 You say things like ‘Things will be so much better when …’

9 This isn’t the life you would have chosen for yourself.

10 You find yourself jealously protecting the half-an-hour you have to yourself each day …

11 … or the one night a week when you go to your evening class, club, pub etc.

12 You have secret friends, hobbies, lovers, possessions … anything, just something that you can call yours.

How did you score? I scored one, perhaps one and a half. A few years back I would have scored a nine, maybe even a ten.

Things were pretty miserable back then: I would get up really early in the morning just so I could be on my own. I would go to work an hour earlier than was strictly necessary, and I’d take the scenic route there. Once at work I’d count the hours till lunchtime, and then again till I could leave. Then I’d drive the long way home, a different route this time, with a certain amount of dread about what awaited me when I got in.

Once home I’d get cross if there was anything that needed my attention – something to fix, a phone call to make, or even post to open. I’d get cross if there was nothing for dinner. I’d get cross if I couldn’t watch television (though I didn’t care what was on). And I’d definitely get cross if I couldn’t have a glass of wine. Particularly as I wanted two. And after all this crossness I’d go to bed. Ridiculously early.

My days would be spent impatiently waiting for the next ‘bit’, just so whatever I was currently doing would end.

I’d spend weekdays longing for the weekend, and the weekend longing for Monday morning.

And I spent hours and hours wishing. I made long secret lists of wishes: ‘Things I would do someday …’ Except someday never came. My only purpose in life was to make sure my body was where it was supposed to be at an allotted time. I was a prisoner inside my own existence.

And the really sad thing is, I wasn’t the only one. My wife felt like that too. We were both slaves to a growing number of responsibilities that controlled our every waking hour.

So who was holding us to ransom? Who was pulling the strings? Who was the evil mastermind behind the wicked forces in our lives?

We were.

We let it happen. And it wasn’t hard to do.

What’s more, we thought it was a phase. A blip. Something to get through. Good times were just around the corner, and if they weren’t, we still had the rest of our lives for things to get better.

And whilst that might be true for me, it wasn’t for my wife.

If I could jump back in time and tell my younger self that I’d only be with Kate for three years and three months, and that those would be the very last moments she would have on this planet, I’d change everything. Right away.

In short: I’d have made every damn day count.

Let’s get one thing straight here. You can’t ‘live every day as though it’s your last’. That’s impractical. Stupid, even. But you can grab back the reins of your life, get back in the driving seat, and take back control. It’s not easy. There’ll be resistance. Lots of it. The majority of it from yourself. But my God, you’ll feel better.

‘Terrific!’ you might be thinking. ‘Another self-help book that wants to tell me how the unhappiness I feel is my fault! What a load of baloney! Can I get a refund?’

Relax.

This book’s being written by an Englishman, and as such it’s finally time to start pointing the finger at others.

Cause Number 3: External Forces

Sometimes the thing that’s making you unhappy is staring you right in the face. People might tell you that you need to relax, calm down, try not to take things personally, roll with the punches, ‘make lemonade when life gives you lemons’, but sometimes that’s not going to cut it.

Sometimes, it isn’t you.

Sometimes it really is them.

Let’s take a look at who they are.

For me, ‘Other People’ have more power than anything else to drain my enthusiasm and suck the pleasure out of life.

It isn’t always the people you think it would be either. Sure, the angry idiot who gestured at me from his car as he drove past took the edge off what might have been a pleasant drive home, but he’s soon forgotten, and I can take solace in the fact that by the way he’s driving he’ll probably wrap his car around a tree in the not too distant future.

No, the people who really have the power to make me unhappy are either people who I care about, or people who are, in some way, important in my life.

We all have them: The manager you don’t get on with – one who seems intent on making your life a misery. The ex-partner you still have to see at family gatherings. The moody work colleague you have to tiptoe around. Or the aged relative who you love dearly, but has started to take you for granted.

Occasionally it isn’t the interaction with these people that drives us crazy, but the lack thereof. Like the client or a supplier who never returns your calls, never answers your emails, and is somehow never in the office when you ‘pop by’. Or the friend or sibling who is so wrapped up in themselves that after an hour or so in their company you really begin to wonder whether all you are is some sort of audience.

Then there are the corporations, companies and government bodies that determine the structure in which we live, and rarely does a day go by when I haven’t got to deal with some browbeaten call centre representative from an organisation that actually doesn’t give two figs about whatever my plight might be. You might be forgiven for wondering if these organisations are run by people whose entire aim in life is to make as much money as possible, by any means, but without bringing the slightest bit of joy to anyone involved in the process. Having worked for a number of such organisations I can divulge that this is indeed the case.

Shortly after writing the first edition of this book, I started running How to Do Everything and Be Happy workshops.3 They’re a lot of fun, and because they’re mainly attended by Brits, one of the most popular elements of the course seems to be when I give the group the opportunity to suggest what would make their ‘External Forces’ list. Here’s just a sample of some of the more popular culprits:

 My job (see General Unhappiness Reason Number 1)

 Call centres

 Idiot drivers

 Parking (or lack of)

 Taxes

 Mondays

 My ex

 My hormones

 Rubbish TV

 People who walk in front of me very, very slowly

 Lateness (mine or other people’s)

 Not getting enough sleep

 Pre-recorded call centre messages – ‘We’re experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment’ – no you’re not! This is the same volume of calls you’ve had for the past ten years!

 The road works we’ve had outside my building for the past ten weeks!

 Unfairness

 Bags of lettuce (why isn’t it possible to buy a bloody lettuce any more?!)

 ‘If your call is about something trivial, press 1. If your call is related to something else trivial, press 2. If your call is related to a trivial matter not related to the first two trivial matters press 3. If your call …’

 Clients who yell at me when there’s nothing I can do about it

 The UK winter (being dark at 4pm)

 Friends letting me down or losing touch with friends

 Family not ‘understanding’ me or saying something that makes me feel low

 ‘Did you know you can check your balance on our website?’ Yes, I did! Put me through to a real person!

 Having a fat day, or bad hair day

 Being broke (worrying about money)

 Stressing about ‘my life’

 Family or friends being sick or ill, i.e. worrying about them

 Not having enough time with my family

 Not having a holiday

 Being stuck in the house

 Fines, e.g. bank fees, parking tickets, etc

 Having to go to the doctor

 Paying for a coffee then finding that it’s rubbish (same goes for a sub-standard meal, or bad service)

 The news

 Thinking about climate change

 Littering

 Other people’s children

 Walking past homeless people

 Boredom

 Mess, that I have to clean up

 Procrastination (makes me guilty, then consequently blue)

Doubtless you’ll have your own items. The question is – what can you do about it? How can you reduce the power these things have over you?

Stop right there!

That way lies madness.

After Kate died one of the first things I did on my ‘quest to find happiness’ was to compile a list very similar to the one above, and then work through it, tackling each item head on with a view to eliminating my unhappiness. I even invented a misery rating so that I could re-sort it and go after the big hitters first.

I soon discovered two things:

Firstly, it didn’t matter how hard I worked, I just never seemed to make a big enough dent in that damn list. I was forever adding new items! I felt like a guy in a leaky rowing boat – going nowhere fast whilst desperately trying to get rid of the water that won’t stop coming in.

Secondly, pretty soon the list itself became something I hated. I ended up calling it my ‘Ugh List’, because that’s how it made me feel: Ugh! Every moment I spent focusing on the list was more time involved with things that made me unhappy. (We’ll be coming back to how the mind deals with focus later in the book, so keep that thought at the back of your mind.)

I’m pleased to report however that the Ugh List did teach me one, very valuable, lesson:

THE ABSENCE OF UNHAPPINESS

IS NOT HAPPINESS

The more I worked on the list the more I came to realise that even if I managed to eliminate all my Ugh items there was a very real chance that I still wouldn’t be happy. Happiness, it seems, just doesn’t work that way.

Whilst it might be mildly interesting to list the reasons for your unhappiness (and quite seductive too – there’s a part of us that wants to do that), I’ve come to suspect that the true cause of unhappiness might actually be the absence of happiness.

Which is very good news.

Because it turns out, happiness isn’t all that difficult to find.

Doing Something About It

Let’s recap.

The top three reasons for General Unhappiness (according to me anyway) are:

Lousy work/life balance

Where the things you have to do dominate your life, and the things you’d like to do just aren’t meaty enough, or you don’t have enough of them, to ‘balance’ your life.

A general lack of control

Where you find yourself bouncing around the pinball machine of life, and you’re not in control of the flippers.

External forces

Where you encounter people or situations that seem intent on taking your sunny smiley mood and crushing it into the ground.

Now, would you like to do something about it?

During the pages that follow I’ll take you through practical steps to (re)organise your life so that you increasingly find yourself doing things that make you happy, and spending less time churning through the stuff that sucks the joy out of life.

Putting the smile back on your face won’t necessarily involve identifying problem areas of your life and attempting to ‘fix’ or eliminate them. But, that said, we are going to improve your work/life balance. We’re also going to snatch back control of your life and put you back in the driving seat. And finally we will start redesigning your life so that those external influences either won’t seem so influential, or won’t be there at all.

This book’s designed to get you started right away. Seven days is really all you need. That’s the minimum time required to read the book, and to start putting some of the ideas into practice. We’ll start with the easy stuff and build on it. If you work with me as we go through the various chapters you’ll feel much happier by this time next week, and better still as the weeks go by.

The ‘Secret to Happiness’, so it turns out, is that there is no secret.

So let’s get started.