If Nothing Gets Better

I’ve been asking myself a question recently: if this general level of happiness stayed the same for the rest of my life, would that be okay?

I don’t mean everything staying literally the same. People change, relationships change, health changes and circumstances change. I don’t particularly want to eat the same breakfast, walk the same streets and have the same conversations for the next forty years either. What I mean is something more like this: if the general experience of being me remained about as good as it is now, if the average Tuesday in ten or twenty years felt approximately as good as the average Tuesday does today, would I be satisfied with that?

Somewhat surprisingly, my answer is yes. Definitely.

That seems important.

The minimum criteria has been met

For most of my life, improvement had an obvious purpose. Earn more money, become more financially secure, improve my health, learn things, have better experiences and eventually gain more control over my time. There was somewhere I was trying to get to, even if I couldn’t always describe exactly where that was.

FIRE was perhaps the clearest example. There was a number on a spreadsheet which represented a fundamentally different kind of life. Keep working, keep saving, keep investing and eventually there would be enough. The destination wasn’t completely imaginary either: reaching financial independence genuinely did change things. Work became optional and a large part of my time became my own.

But having solved one problem, it’s surprisingly easy to invent another. Now I have the freedom, what am I going to do with it? What should I learn? What should I create? How fit could I become? Am I making sufficient use of my time? Am I contributing enough? Am I becoming the person I ought to be?

Those are interesting questions, and I don’t want to stop asking them. But I’ve realised there is a rather important fact underneath all of them: I don’t need the answers to work out in order for my life to be okay.

The minimum criteria has already been met.

A floor, not a ceiling

At first this sounds rather like another version of “enough”. If life is already good enough, perhaps I should stop trying to improve it. Sit back, declare victory and spend the next few decades doing as little as possible.

But that isn’t what I mean at all. This isn’t a ceiling on how good life is allowed to become. It’s a baseline I already know can be satisfactory.

That doesn’t mean I can’t fall below it. Health can deteriorate, relationships can suffer, circumstances can change, and neglecting the things which currently make my life good would be a fairly reliable way of making it worse. The point isn’t that I’ve secured some permanent minimum level of happiness. It’s that I no longer need improvement in order to make the present acceptable.

Suppose my current life is at some arbitrary level of happiness, H. There are plenty of things I could do which might move me to H+1. I could get fitter, improve my Japanese, learn something difficult, travel somewhere new, start a project, develop a skill, deepen a relationship or discover something I haven’t even considered yet. I hope some of those things will make my life better and I fully intend to keep trying them.

Some will work. Some will make almost no difference. Some will probably fail completely. The interesting thing is that if they fail and I simply return to H, that’s okay. I already know H is somewhere I’m happy to live.

That changes the risk calculation considerably.

Improvement without dissatisfaction

I think I’ve often implicitly treated the desire to improve something as evidence that its current state isn’t satisfactory. If I want to become fitter, I must be dissatisfied with my fitness. If I want more interesting experiences, my existing experiences must be insufficient. If I want to learn more, perhaps the person I currently am isn’t knowledgeable or capable enough.

But those things don’t necessarily follow. I can be reasonably happy with my fitness while wanting to become fitter. I can enjoy my current life while being excited by the possibility of new experiences. I can be satisfied with what I know while being intensely curious about everything I don’t. I can even like who I am while still wanting to find out who else I might become.

Perhaps improvement doesn’t have to be powered by dissatisfaction. It can be powered by curiosity.

That feels like a much nicer fuel.

It might even make improvement easier. If learning Japanese is part of an attempt to construct a future version of myself who is finally interesting and accomplished enough, every abandoned textbook and forgotten kanji is evidence that the project is failing. If I’m already basically content with myself and learning Japanese because I’d quite like to speak better Japanese, the stakes are considerably lower. I can still take it seriously and work hard at it, but it doesn’t have to carry the burden of making me happy.

Maintenance still matters

None of this means I can stop making an effort. The current baseline isn’t self-sustaining, and pretending otherwise would probably be a good way to discover how quickly a satisfactory life can deteriorate.

I still have to exercise. Those twenty push-ups aren’t going to do themselves, despite years of giving them ample opportunity. Relationships require attention. Health requires some effort. Money still needs managing. My surroundings need looking after. Novelty seems to be something I need reasonably regularly, so I have to continue putting myself in situations where new things can happen.

This connects to my recent thinking about choosing resistance, but perhaps modifies it slightly. Resistance isn’t inherently virtuous. I don’t need to make my life difficult simply because overcoming difficulty builds character. Some resistance is worth choosing because it maintains things I already value. I may never stop having the tiny daily argument with myself about doing twenty push-ups, but winning that argument most days helps preserve a body and a life that I’m reasonably happy with.

Perhaps there are two broad categories here: maintenance and exploration. Maintenance protects the baseline. Exploration investigates what might exist above it.

Both require effort, but for quite different reasons.

Things that don’t move the needle

This also changes how I feel about activities which don’t accomplish very much. If I’m still trying to construct a satisfactory life, spending three hours learning about something I subsequently abandon can feel wasteful. Did it improve me? Did it contribute towards a goal? Was it productive? Would the time have been better spent doing something which moved the needle?

But if the needle is already somewhere acceptable, perhaps it doesn’t always need moving.

I can spend an afternoon learning about polymaths and never do anything useful with what I’ve learned. I can walk somewhere because I’ve never been down that street before. I can try a hobby, discover that I’m not particularly good at it and then decide I don’t actually like it very much. I can read a book which doesn’t change my life, visit somewhere which turns out to be merely quite nice, or lose an hour to something completely idiotic on the internet.

None of these things needs to justify itself as an investment in Future Martin. They happened inside a life I already wanted.

Perhaps some of them are better understood as a celebration of existence. I’m here, for some finite and unknown amount of time, with the ability to walk down unfamiliar streets, learn pointless things, eat interesting food, meet people, notice things and occasionally spend an afternoon doing something simply because I can. Not everything needs to improve my life. Some things can just be part of celebrating the fact that I get to have one.

Of course I don’t want everything to be like that. Mastery, relationships and contribution all require sustained attention, and constantly jumping between novel distractions probably isn’t a recipe for much of anything. But it seems equally strange to demand that every discretionary hour produce measurable progress. Sometimes curiosity can lead somewhere useful. Sometimes it can lead nowhere at all.

Both are allowed.

A surprisingly good downside

Financial independence changed my relationship with risk because it changed what failure meant. If I don’t need employment income, I can try something professionally and discover that it doesn’t work without the consequences being catastrophic. The downside may simply be returning to a situation which was already financially secure.

I wonder whether something similar happens once you’ve established an acceptable baseline of happiness.

If I’m already happy enough, experiments don’t need to succeed. I can pursue mastery without needing to become exceptional. I can create something without needing anyone to care about it. I can travel without every trip needing to be transformative. I can attempt to improve my life without quietly declaring its current state unacceptable.

There is still upside. Potentially enormous upside. A new interest could become a lifelong passion, a new relationship could become enormously important, and something I learn for no particular reason could change the direction of my life.

I’ve simply made the downside rather good.

If nothing gets better

So perhaps this is another form of freedom. Not freedom from effort, because maintaining a good life takes effort. Not freedom from ambition, because there are still plenty of things I’d like to improve. Not freedom from change either, because change is unavoidable and quite a lot of it is desirable.

It’s freedom from requiring the future to fix the present.

I still want novelty. I still want mastery, relationships and contribution. I still want to improve things, learn things and occasionally choose something difficult simply because I think the result will be worthwhile. I’ll also still occasionally force myself to do twenty push-ups while wondering why a supposedly financially independent man is taking orders from yesterday’s version of himself.

The difference is that all of those things are now happening on top of something. There is a baseline which has already passed my minimum criteria for a good life. If an ambitious experiment fails, a new interest goes nowhere, a trip is merely pleasant rather than life-changing, or I don’t become quite as impressive a person as Future Martin was supposed to be, I know approximately where I might land.

Here.

And if I’m genuinely able to say that I’d be happy if “here” remained the general level of my life for the rest of it, that’s a remarkably fortunate position from which to find out what else might be possible.