How to be Unhappy

a guide to avoiding happiness

Dear friends,

Are you happy?

I’ve been thinking about happiness a lot recently and I’ve been asking myself some questions.

What is happiness?

Is happiness something worth pursuing?

Can you even pursue happiness? Or is it something that happens to you?¹

How do you become happy, and, once you are, how do you stay happy?

I’ve realised I don’t have the answers to any of these question, or at the very least, the answers are more complicated than I can handle and looking into it gives me a headache… which is not good for my own personal happiness levels. There are entire institutes dedicated to researching happiness, so it’s obviously something very complex that humanity needs a few more thousands of year to figure out. If it was simple, there wouldn’t be a need for national personal wellness surveys, or courses dedicated to teaching the ‘science’ of being happy. Because we’d all be happy, wouldn’t we?

In short, there are no simple answers to the conundrum of happiness. I know, because I skimmed parts of the United Nations 2024 World Happiness Report, and it’s clear, right from the start, that there are many variables involved in determining and measuring happiness. To quote the key insights from Chapter 3: Child and Adolescent Well-Being: Global Trends, Challenges and Opportunities:

 ‘Life satisfaction levels, trends and correlates vary across age, gender, world regions and countries, and economic development levels.’²

Who would have guessed?

Of course happiness partly depends on our external circumstances: where we live and how we live; the opportunities we have access to, our physical health and the people we’re surrounded by—all have some impact on our happiness. It doesn’t take a global study or a research paper to figure out that someone who lives in a war-torn country, who has lost their home, their loved ones and who lives day to day in constant danger of death, injury, or starvation is not going to be very happy.

But what if you’re not that person? What if you live in one of the more economically developed countries in the world, during a time of peace, with access to education, welfare, a stable income, family and friends, and plenty of modern conveniences and luxuries? Wouldn’t you be happy? Shouldn’t you be happy?

And yet so many of those people are not happy. They are anything but happy. I know, because:

1. I know many of them. I teach many of them. The UK ranked 20^th in the 2024 global happiness tables, but our young people are at the bottom of the European rankings in terms of happiness and are apparently suffering a ‘happiness recession’³. I’ve been teaching for over a decade, and, even in that relatively short time, I’ve seen first-hand the significant increase in mental health issues amongst teenagers.

2. I have been one of them. More on that in a bit.

The truth is that there’s more to happiness than the bottom two or three tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Here’s Maslow’s Hierarchy if you’re not familiar with it:

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs vs. PJ's Hierarchy of Needs

Have you ever heard of the Happiness Pie Chart?

This was something I first came across when I was enrolled on the Hope Programme—an initiative in the UK that aims to support people with long term illness in managing their symptoms and living hopeful lives.

The Happiness Pie Chart was proposed in a 2005 paper by researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. The chart posits that 50% of our happiness is determined by genetics, 40% by our intentional activities and 10% by our life circumstances⁴.

This means that, whilst we can do nothing about our genetics, and probably very little about our life circumstances, we can control 40% of our own happiness through our mental and physical habits.

Of course, the reality is not that simple.

Each of those three areas of the pie chart influence the others, so that perhaps some sort of trauma in your childhood exacerbates a genetic disposition for anxiety and depression and therefore lowers your capacity for happiness. Or perhaps a genetic illness prevents you from engaging in physical activities that would naturally enhance your happiness levels.

And how do we define ‘life circumstances’? Gender, age, economic stability? Employment status? Family and upbringing? Relationship status? Social status? Geographical environment? Work-life balance? Whether you’re a cat person but your landlord won’t let you have a cat? Can you really compare two people with similar ‘life circumstances’ but from countries with wildly different environments, cultures and economies? If those two people swapped environments, how much would that impact their happiness? 

And if you’re wondering about how significant genetics really are in determining happiness, the UN’s 2022 World Happiness Report dedicated Chapter 5: Exploring the Biological Basis for Happiness to this question. After summarising various studies done with identical twins, they concluded that:

‘approximately 40% of the differences in happiness are accounted for by genetic differences between people while the remaining variance is accounted for by environmental influences that are unique to an individual’⁵. 

As you can see, the secret to happiness isn’t as easy to figure out as you might think.

As much as we continue to study it, and puzzle over it, and try to provide step-by-step guides on how to maximize our happiness levels, we still don’t really have it figured out.

Which is a little crazy to me. We have no trouble being unhappy, angry, jealous, or anxious: so why is happiness so elusive? And when we do find it, why is it so often fleeting?

So, I’ve been thinking about it, and what I’ve come to realise is that, although I might not definitively know how to be happy, I do know a fair bit about being unhappy. And I think, rather than reading research papers and listening to TED talks, or seeking out wellness gurus, the best way for me to understand happiness is to take a good look at how I managed to be wildly and successfully unhappy for so long.

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Abandoned by Hope

I am being poisoned by this world

and its burden of living

and I wish I was dying quickly

instead of slowly;

in roaring agony, instead of silent

solitude.

Someday, the ties that keep me here will be cut

and I’ll be free.

For now, I cling on, against my will.

I’m waiting;

dying the interminable death of those

abandoned by hope.

—poem by a high-functioning depressive

I’d completely forgotten I’d written this poem until I happened upon it recently. It was a bit of a shock to read it again. Although the feelings expressed in the poem have long passed, the memory of those feelings was as fresh and raw as if someone had lifted the gauze covering a wound I thought had disappeared, only to uncover an extremely nasty scar left in its place. I didn’t feel the same emotions, but I still perfectly and profoundly understood them.

After the shock, and the flinching flashback, I felt nothing but relief. I thank God those feelings are in the past.

Eleven years is a long time to be depressed. To be honest, a single day is too long to be depressed. Depression is awful and is the worse thing I have ever had to endure—even worse than two-and-counting years of long covid. I spent the whole of my twenties as a ‘high-functioning depressive’ and my early thirties in recovery. ‘High-functioning depressive’ isn’t an official medical term, but it has recently been recognised as a useful way to identify those who, despite being able to fulfil their responsibilities and complete normal daily tasks, are in fact battling mental health issues. And that was me. Perfectly normal and cheerful on the outside; a yawning abyss of despair on the inside.

I hated my life. I was disappointed every day that I woke up. I thought about dying a lot. And there were a few times where I did more than just think about it and came very close to doing something about it.

Even in moments that were pleasant and enjoyable—time spent with my family, a trip somewhere new, playing with the kittens, going to a concert—there was this ingrained sadness that never went away. After a while, I actually began to fear feeling any joy at all, because I knew how frail and fleeting it would be. I was terrified of being happy, even a little, because I knew the depths of the low that would immediately follow. I longed to feel nothing at all. My aim was to achieve numbness; to feel indifferent, neutral, empty. Nothingness would be better than the ugly, raging, all-consuming feelings I grappled with every day.

I had no hope for the future other than that I wouldn’t have to live much longer. I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t make it past thirty, and then once I did pass thirty, I started praying I wouldn’t make it past thirty-five.

I felt like I was living in a trench, where I couldn’t even imagine what the landscape above looked like, if it would even be worth getting out for. Perhaps there was just another trench one step away for me to fall into. And every attempt I made to escape the trench only seemed to make it deeper and deeper, and my fall back into it longer and more dangerous.

Logically, I knew there was no reason why I should feel the way I did. Yet every logical assessment I made of my life made me feel I had nothing to live for.

Eventually, I became resigned to the idea that I would never be happy. I concluded I just wasn’t wired up that way. I wasn’t designed for happiness. I was faulty—born with this massive flaw. It was just the way I was and it was never going to change. If I could somehow reduce the intensity of the depression or decrease the regularity with which I would fall apart behind closed doors, that might be enough to survive the rest of my unhappy life. Happiness was off the table—an impossibility, a forbidden fruit, and something too dangerous to gain and then lose.

My only ambition was to be less unhappy.

I would love to say there was a particular moment or revelation that changed everything for me—to pass on some sort of wisdom or cure that fixed everything overnight. But the truth is that my journey out of depression was a long, slow process. It probably started whilst I was still in the thick of it—tiny, seemingly inconsequential things that shifted my trajectory millimetre by millimetre. There are a few choices I made along the way that certainly helped, but getting to the point of even being able to make those decisions was a long, slow process too. All I can say for certain is that the key thing that changed over time was my perspective.

When I started to change the way I perceived life, the depression began to lift—until one day I looked up and realised it had gone. I was out of the trench. I could see the horizon and there was a sun rising on it. I had hope—a hope that I hadn’t been able see before because I was looking at everything from the wrong angle.

This doesn’t, by the way, mean I now experience endless joy—that life is all rainbows and candy and kittens. Honestly, more kittens really wouldn’t hurt.

I still get lows, because that’s perfectly normal for the human experience. I get stressed and anxious, especially when the fatigue is bad, but I’m now able to identify the cause of those feelings and manage them in healthy ways. I am, finally, happy. I love my life. I’m looking forward to the years to come. And I thank God for every new day I’m given.

So, those are my unhappiness expert credentials: horribly depressed for eleven years.

With that in mind, and remembering that this is purely anecdotal and not backed by any scientific research on my part, here’s my personal guide to being unhappy.

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Seven Steps to Being Unhappy

1. Separate mind, body & spirit: make sure these three things are never in balance and refuse to acknowledge that there is any connection between them.

   I am someone who naturally spends a lot of time in my head: thinking, questioning, analysing, strategising, learning, hypothesising, imagining, internally processing… my brain really doesn’t know how to shut up and it’s a problem. If I’m not careful, it can become a runaway train that ruins my sleep, my peace and ultimately my mental health.

   There are only two things that have ever managed to stop my over-thinking habits: one is long covid induced brain fog (brain.exe. not found. please reboot) and the other is physical exercise. The first and only doctor I ever spoke to about my depression gave me this one key piece of advice: join an exercise class. Give your brain an hour off a week. So, with a hefty does of scepticism, I did and it turned out he was right, because, apparently, my brain can’t multi-task when it’s engaged in coordinating my limbs so that I don’t constantly fall flat on my face. Turns out, contrary to my experience of physical education at school, I actually really enjoy exercise.

2. Define failure and success by someone else’s standards. There are plenty of people, cultures and institutions out there who will happily offer you their definitions of success and failure to live by.

   If you want to be truly unhappy, you should listen to them. Let them tell you that power, influence, qualifications, recognition and fame, money and material wealth determine whether you’re winning at life. Let them set the standards for you. Bought your own house? Success. Still renting? Failure. Married? Success. Still single? Failure. Promoted to a managerial position by the time you’re thirty? Success. Still only a classroom teacher? Failure. Traditionally published? Success. Independently published? Failure.

   It took me a while to figure this one out, but eventually, I suddenly thought… hang on a minute, society seems to be telling me that I’m failing at life, but what do I think? Do I actually want anything of the things I’ve been told I should want in order to have a successful and happy life? Turns out, when I stopped to think about it, that no, I didn’t. I actually already had the life I wanted. To me, success was about how much of my time was my own. Did I have time to write? Yes. Did I have time to spend with the people I love? Yes. Did I enjoy my job now that it wasn’t running me into the ground? Yes. In my eyes, that is success.

3. Comparison: life is a competition, didn’t you know? You get entered from the moment you’re born and from then on every one of your peers is a rival.

   How come she got a promotion and I didn’t? How come he has more followers than I do? Why have my neighbours got brand new cars when I’m driving a fifteen-year old banger that sounds like it smokes twenty packs a day in second gear? If you’re not beating your friends, neighbours, colleagues and siblings in all areas of life, then why are you even here? Are you even taking life seriously?

   Of course, no one really knows what they’re competing for. A sense of superiority? Everyone acknowledging you were the best of your generation for five minutes after they’ve lowered your coffin into the grave? Once you start wondering what the point of the comparison game is, what sort of prize you’re hoping to gain from it, it starts to feel pretty dumb. Besides, no one is having as good a life as they claim to be—especially if they’re making those claims on social media. Everyone curates their life for outsiders to view. Even I hoover the flat when I’m expecting visitors so I won’t be perceived as a complete slob. At the end of the day you just end up comparing your reality with someone else’s curated, polished, tied up with ribbons version of their reality⁶.

4. Want what you don’t have and always want more. You’ll be helping the economy.

   Capitalism depends on us wanting what we don’t have, because to get it there’s a 99.9% chance we’ll need money… which means we’ll work, which is what businesses need us to do so they can produce a product or service they can sell to everyone. And then we’ll spend the money we worked for and the businesses whose products we buy will make a profit. And the more we work, and the more we spend, the bigger those profits will be. It’s a beautiful cycle that can never be broken, as long as businesses always have something to sell us that we want. Or think we want.

   The trick, of course, is to create the want in the first place. This is why nothing is made to last, why everything, especially technology is always being ‘upgraded’ and why updates for older software get pulled every few years so that you’re forced to buy the latest software instead, which inevitably needs new hardware to run it properly. To be truly unhappy, there must always be more to want. Once you have what you originally thought you wanted, you need to move the goalposts to want the next best thing. Got a one-bedroom house? Now you need a two bedroom house so you can have a study. Two bedroom house? Now you need a three bedroom house so you can have a study and the cat can have its own room. Three bedroom house? Let’s build an extension because, as well as a bedroom for yourself, one for your twelve cats, and a study, you also need a home gym/cinema/library/guestroom. The lie that’s advertised to us all day, every day, is that once we have what we want, we’ll be happy. We just need a bit more and then we’ll finally be satisfied. But the truth is that if we want to be happy, we have to want less.

5. Have no boundaries. Let people walk all over you and strive to please them, no matter what. This is the only way to ensure people like you enough to not leave you.

   Don’t protect your time, live by everyone else’s expectations and agendas, never say no. If you say no, you’re being mean. And if you must say no, make sure you have a jolly good, life-or-death reason for it. And then promise to make up for being such a let down at a later date. And wallow in guilt until you’ve sufficiently made up for it and apologised at least seventeen times. That’s the only way to develop enough insecurity and resentment in your relationships to be really unhappy. If you start setting boundaries and enforcing them, you might become an emotionally healthier person, become better at communicating and therefore develop robust, trusting and long-lasting, non-toxic relationships with the people you love.

6. Focus on your weaknesses, not your strengths. On what you hate not what you love. You can’t become a stronger more successful person if you don’t focus all your time and energy on getting better at the things you have no natural gifting for or interest in.

   You must push yourself to do the things you’re not only uncomfortable with but actively hate and despise. If there is nothing more horrifying to you than taking up a leadership position which requires crunching numbers and processing data all day, and then presenting your findings in long boring meetings for an agenda that doesn’t even align with your values, then that is obviously a weak area you need to work on and you should totally apply for that role. Under no circumstances should you figure out your natural strengths and lean into those—especially if they’re the kinds of strengths that aren’t highly valued, won’t get you recognition or a promotion. You can’t be unhappy if you start enjoying your job, or start using your free time for things that bring you personal satisfaction⁷.

7. Get stuck in a misguided-at-best, exploitative-cult-at-worst branch of a religious movement that promotes all of the above so that: you ignore you mind and your body in favour of only ‘spiritual’ things; you believe you’re failing God and not just yourself; you’re forced to compete with other believers who are supposed to be your ‘family’; you’re constantly looking for the next ‘revelation’ and ‘season of prosperity’ because salvation is no longer enough; you always, without question, submit to the will of others, particularly those in spiritual authority, because that’s what being a good believer must look like; you ignore your God-given talents and interests for things considered more ‘spiritual’.

   …but that story is for another post.

   I should add that my faith is what kept me going through my eleven years of depression, and it is what got me out of it too, despite some unhealthy influences. And writing… writing saved my life on many, many occasions. If ever I feel low, it is my first port of call for relief… which doesn’t sound very spiritual of me (see number 7 again), but I truly believe that the joy I find in writing is a gift that God, in His goodness, has given to me for that very purpose and because that’s how He made me.

So, there we have it. My Seven Steps to Being Unhappy.

Let me know if you think I missed something! Even as I wrap this up, a few other things come to mind.

And whatever you do, if you are struggling with poor mental health, however insignificant or silly you might think your feelings are—let me assure you that they are not and you are not alone. Please make sure you talk to someone about it. If I had only done that, then it might not have taken me eleven years to learn how to be happy.

Comments are open for everyone, so if you have a question or a thought, let me know!

Take care,

PJ

1. Total tangent here, but interestingly, both the word ‘happy/happiness’ and ‘happen’ share the same etymological root, from the word ‘hap’, which means "luck, chance, fortune, or fate".

2. World Happiness Report 2024 | The World Happiness Report

3. ‘Happiness recession’: UK 15-year-olds at bottom of European satisfaction league | Young people | The Guardian

4. How Much of Your Happiness Is Under Your Control?

5. Exploring the Biological Basis for Happiness | The World Happiness Report

6. I wrote about social media as a form of escapism from reality here:

7. I talk a little more about this here: