A few weeks ago, after a terrible day at university, I was walking home. The sun bled softly into the sea of suburban housing. For once, there was no music in my ears, no call to make, no deadline hovering. The street was quiet, and I realised (uncomfortably) that I felt… good? Not ecstatic, not triumphant. Just okay.
Then instinct took over: I reached for my phone to check for new messages, cleared my throat as if to fill the silence, adjusted my hair in a window’s reflection. My body was looking for something to fix, some motion to remind itself of purpose. Stillness felt foreign, like driving past your primary school on the way to work.
We spend most of our lives in pursuit mode. Better grades, better jobs, better versions of ourselves. The chase feels natural, almost noble. We fill our calendars and call it meaning, but when happiness actually arrives, it feels unfamiliar. We try to hold it, explain it, or fill it—as if peace itself were proof that something’s gone wrong.
It isn’t that we dislike happiness; it’s that it disrupts the narrative that keeps us moving. So much of identity is built around the notion that we are always becoming. Students who will become graduates, who will become workers, who will become weary—still chasing the next version of ourselves. Striving gives shape to our lives. You are an actor, and your role is written before you even step on stage. But when happiness shows up, it pauses the plot. The tension dissolves. For a moment, there is nothing to fix, nothing to reach for. And that stillness can feel like a kind of loss.
Happiness threatens the self we’ve built through adversity. It erases the friction our ego depends on to feel alive. In a culture that prizes productivity and constant improvement, simply being content meets suspicious eyes. Our society glorifies the hustle, romanticises exhaustion, but treats contentment as “cope.” The intangible fruits of our labour feel unearned.
So when genuine happiness appears, ordinary, unfiltered, without purpose, we rush to manage it. We open our phones, searching for the perfect fifteen-second song to make the moment look how it felt. We downplay it, laugh it off, change the subject. It’s easier to seem unfazed than to admit that something kind actually reached us. We call it connection, but often it’s just fear: fear of sitting alone with our happiness, of letting it exist without witnesses.
One night, I caught my reflection in the bathroom mirror, hair flattened on one side, toothpaste on my shirt, face a little too honest under the fluorescent light. I stood there, waiting for that usual reflex to adjust something: fix the hair, wipe the shirt, rehearse a better version of myself. But I didn’t. I just looked. It was strangely funny, how ordinary I seemed — not the high achiever, not the perfectionist, just a body caught mid-breath, alive for no particular reason. For a moment, I felt something soft and wordless: the quiet relief of not needing to be better, only real.
