Matt Heath: It's time to celebrate the life more ordinary

Breakfast radio host and newly minted author Matt Heath wonders if happiness lies in allowing ourselves to love our unextraordinary lives just as they are.

No matter how good things get, we humans can find ways not to enjoy ourselves. When we get what we want, we want something else. You see this in biographies of rock stars. They find themselves feeling miserable at the height of their wealth and success. You see it when people win lotteries and are surprised that the money doesn’t sort out their emotional problems. You see it in New Zealanders with quite good lives who feel stressed, dissatisfied, lonely, bored, scared, angry or sad.

Our solutions to these problems usually involve buying things, staring into our phones or shoving more and more stuff into our faces. It doesn’t seem to be working. In our state of constant dissatisfaction, many of us feel like we aren’t really living our lives yet. That certain things need to happen so we can begin. We are just struggling away until that house, promotion, new country or fantasy partner will kick things off. Unfortunately, when we get to this amazing place, we feel the same as we did before. We now need something else down the path so we can finally be happy. It seems to me the solution to this problem is to find a way to enjoy where we are now. If we can do that, we might also enjoy the things to come. As the great Turkish slave philosopher Epictetus once reportedly said, "Happiness doesn't come from getting more but from learning to love what you have".

A Life Less Ordinary is an ordinary movie starring Ewan McGregor and Cameron Diaz. It’s about living a life full of extraordinary things and adventures. The aim is not to get stuck in a rut. Not to get tied down. To up-sticks whenever you can and do amazing things. It would seem to make sense that a focus on the exciting would make life better. But I think there is a lot to be said for a Life More Ordinary or at least there is nothing wrong with an ordinary life. In fact, a life of working hard to provide for your family, contributing to your local community and generally being a top person to the people around you may make you happier than a life off chasing exciting things.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the most comprehensive and longest-running study on human happiness ever undertaken. Across its 70 years spent following 1000 Bostonians they found that the quality of relationships with friends and family determined our happiness much more than material success, adventure or fame. It’s the roots we lay that make the difference. As the head of the study, Psychiatrist Robert Wardinger put it in a 2023 lecture. “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period’.

Satisfaction in life comes largely from the interactions we have with the people around us. That’s the bit you need to sort out before you go on your adventures. We all know couples who have tried to fix their relationships with a holiday. They normally end up in a screaming match in the Uber on the way to the airport.

Of course, you could have an exciting life that is packed with wonderful relationships and be happy and less ordinary. It’s just that its the people around you and not the location and activity that are most important. Generally a workplace full of nasty people you don’t like is terrible no matter how glamourise the job. Yet a workplace full of friends who care about you can be an amazing experience, even if the work is mundane.

If you accept all this, you might ask why do we humans tend towards dissatisfaction. I believe its because we aren’t evolved to be happy. Back in the day, the hunter and gatherer who sat on the savanna and thought to himself things are great, I am amazing, life is wonderful – that guy was eaten by a tiger. The unsatisfied ancient human who sat there hassling himself about the state of things climbed a tree and survived. We modern humans come from a line of dissatisfied people.

So, if dissatisfaction is a feature and not a bug of our existence, what can we do? Well we can change our perspective. Instead of focusing on the extraordinary lives others seem to be living on Instagram, we can shift our focus to the many in this world who have less than ourselves and start to appreciate an ordinary house, car and food on the table, if we're fortunate enough to have that.

If we zone into our friends and family and do the work to grow those bonds, life gets full pretty quickly. Maybe invite some mates to play golf, come round for dinner, go for a walk or just put down our phones and listen to them when they speak. There’s all kinds of excitement in social interaction. We are evolved to be social such that our mind and body reward us for it. You don’t need to be racing the streets of Dubai in a Lamborghini to get that buzz. When we are with people we love, we feel safe and powerful. As the saying goes, "Put a human into the jungle and they'll die, put an extended family in there and you have an apex predator."

The point I am trying to make is this – contentedness isn’t about chasing a life less ordinary but instead learning to love whatever life you have. We will make our lives punishing wherever we are unless we have our emotions and connections sorted. Then we can be happy where we are.

A Life Less Punishing: 13 Ways To Love the Life You've Got, by Matt Heath (Allen & Unwin NZ, RRP: $37.99) is out now.