It's My Birthday and I'll Write If I Want To
Friends, today marks my 37th trip around the sun.
Yesterday, my husband asked me what I want to do for my birthday. I took some time to think about it and said:
I want to have eggs for breakfast.
I want to get coffee somewhere.
I want to write.
I want to take a long walk.
I want a nap.
I want to grab a decent bottle of wine and some snacks from the local deli and go to town on them in our apartment this evening.
As I rattled off my wishlist, I realized that I’d described what I basically do every day, minus the deli snacks because weight doesn’t stay off me in quite the way it used to.
Why on earth do I want to do the same thing on my birthday as I do every day? That’s so boring.
Then it hit me. It’s not because it’s boring, it’s because now I love my everyday routine. So much, I don’t need an escape from it.
Craft a life you actually enjoy living and your need for distractions goes out the window
Society tells us that celebrations should be fancy. Our weddings are over-the-top parties with 400 guests and a million expensive canapes. Our birthday celebrations and baby and bridal showers should be lavish affairs complete with signature cocktails and credit card-busting outfits.
It’s a “special treat,” a day you’ll remember forever.
Except, thanks to a sneaky thing called impact bias, you actually won’t remember the day with quite the fervor you think. Humans are terrible at gauging how long an event will have an effect on them, it’s almost always less than we imagine. So these special days essentially put a lot of pressure on you, just for you to forget about them far sooner than imagined.
In reality, they are just distractions. We love the day, but then we go back to our lives that we’re pretty unsatisfied with, complete with debt, a job we hate and an overwhelming sense we’re not as far ahead in our lives as we would like.
In graph form, it looks like this (hastily sketched into my bullet journal this morning):
The peaks of the special days are great, but they’re countered by a lower happiness baseline than any of us would really like.
A simple life changes the baseline
Back in the UK, I thought I had a simple life because I practiced minimalism around the house and spent intentionally, In reality, it was still super complicated. I still spent most of my downtime rushing around. Sure, I was doing nice things and still being intentional in my choices, but I packed it all in way too much. There were the dinners, the seeing friends, the weekend breaks that, pre-Covid, happened rather often because I hated where I lived.
I was ‘treating myself’ every second I had the chance, and being miserable when I wasn’t.
My life only truly simplified once I stopped worshipping at the altar of busyness, which is basically when I hit the road. My days became less frantic, filled with fewer appointments with more time to spend on meaningful pursuits and work.
I thought I’d be bored. Everyone around me thought I’d be bored.
I’m not bored.
So much so, my birthday is spent writing to you, a task I do every week, rather than treating myself to an experience that would be more ‘exciting. Except of course I would probably spend too much money and forget about it sooner than I would like.
With a simple life, the graph changes shape:
I’m not a fricking miser, I still like a special day or two in my life. And these days still give a boost of dopamine.
But the striking difference between the two graphs is the baseline. A simple, examined life means you’re living in a space that’s been crafted by you, around your wants and needs so your everyday baseline is so much higher. It’s no longer an all or nothing situation.
And that higher baseline is worth the excitement of every special treat day in the world.
If you’ve not yet subscribed to Simple + Straightforward, now’s your chance:
And if you liked this enough to share, be my guest:
Finally, I’m still writing away on Medium, in my opinion still one of the best places to hear from indie writers on the internet. If you’re not a member, it’s only $5 a month and if you sign up via my referral link, I’ll get a portion of your membership fee, at no extra cost to you.