Edel Coffey: When did uneventful start being equated with dull?
Often we feel like we’re underperforming even when we don’t really know what more we want from life, even when we find we have everything we want and need
Achievement is often on our minds at this time of year.
We reflect back on what we have achieved in the year gone by, or failed to achieve as is often the case, while we try to enforce the often unrealistic new year’s resolutions we have set for ourselves.
I was thinking about achievement versus success last week because a few women I know had expressed a sense of failure for not achieving things on the more measurable, obvious performative planes of their lives, like careers or sporting prowess.
They had focused rather on the personal, emotional and domestic planes of their lives where they had ‘achieved’ a lot as far as I could see – strong marriages, lovely homes, happy families.
Another friend described her life as boring, and I know she meant it looked boring from the outside, not that she herself was bored of it, but it was still interesting to me that she thought it looked boring when actually I thought it looked quite perfect.
When did uneventful start being equated with dull?
These excellent women seemed to doubt themselves because they just lived their lives in a straightforward and happy way.
Was it enough?, one of them asked.
They seemed to think that their happy and content lives didn’t add up to much if they couldn’t point to loud work promotions or career achievements or exciting newsflash updates that they could post on their Instagram grids.
They weren’t dissatisfied with their lives, but they did feel a latent pressure to be more spectacular, more extraordinary.
The feeling of failure came from the outside, not from within and it made me wonder about what we see as a successful life at this point in time.
It made me wonder when did ordinary lives stop being enough?
What’s so wrong with a ‘boring’ life anyway as long as you yourself are not bored?
A life where things run to plan and on schedule, a life of no alarms and no surprises? It sounds like a dream.
I don’t really agree with steering our lives according to the map of should. I’m more of a gut instinct kind of driver, which has led me off the road a couple of times too.
We often equate achievement with success and feel like we should be achieving more, but ask yourself when were you last happiest and it might not be the big career peak or the promotion or the salary bonus or the medal but something quieter like an unexpected picnic with a friend or a quiet hour alone with a partner, simple things, small things, and yet somehow great things.
Many of us will have set goals for ourselves this month. Many of them will be unattainable.
Many of them won’t change our lives or make us any happier.
I understand the urge to shake things up, to add some excitement, some out-of-the-ordinary diversion, but with extreme highs, come extreme lows and bright, shiny, extraordinary things can lose their sparkle very quickly.
I think of the experience of buying a brand new car, which I have done exactly once in my life, many years ago.
It rapidly goes from being a delightful luxurious toy to being just a means of getting you from A to B (I recuse the perfect automobile that is the Porsche from this example).
But what I’m trying to say is firecracker highs dissipate as quickly as the fuse has burnt out. Big achievements, while lovely and impressive, aren’t really what makes a life a happy one, a pleasurable one, a content one in my opinion
It’s a very human instinct to compare ourselves to others. We’ve always done it.
The concept of keeping up with the Joneses has been around a lot longer than the 21st century version, the Kardashians.
Often we feel like we’re underperforming even when we don’t really know what more we want from life, even when we find we have everything we want and need, even when we know that our ordinary lives are indeed good enough.
Comparing ourselves to others is so easy to do, particularly at this time of year when many of us are trying to ‘improve’ ourselves but perhaps the real achievements in life are not the degrees and the PhDs, the medals and trophies, the promotions and financial rewards.
Perhaps the real achievement is living an ordinary life of contentment and not feeling the pressure to add baubles of achievement to it.
I’m going to try to enjoy the ordinary moments of life a little more this year, the routine and the everyday.
As a new year dawns, I’m going trying to savour the ordinary. Besides, achievements don’t have to be big and flashy.
They can be something as simple as getting from the start of the week to the end of the week and repeating the familiar cycle again. I think that’s achievement enough for January.
