N.B.: If I link you to this personally, it is to explain why I usually seem to be in a great mood. It’s an experiment. I’m normally in merely a good mood, and I am pushing myself to be great.
This is an unusual entry for a Today I Learned site, even by my standards. But I think it’s something I would prefer to pre-register ahead of time.
I’ve always been predisposed to mirth. I laugh easily; I rarely get depressed; I’m just about always in a content mood these days, in no small part because I have actually succeeded on the meager goals I set for myself as a teenager (soulmate: check, child: check, sujuvuus vieraalla kielellä: yhä työn alla mutta kyllä se siitä, give me maybe five more years). Yet for some reason I have always felt it is, I don’t know, low status to be so effortlessly joyful and opulent. Like people will take you less seriously or something. So I’ve been reluctant to push my naturally good mood into the realm of actively loving life as my default state.
But what if I’m wrong? The further I get in life, the more I realize that perception may have been fundamentally misinformed. The people I know who actively, viscerally enjoy most of their waking moments are not only smarter and harder working than the people I know who don’t; they even seem to rise through the ranks of whatever they do faster than they would otherwise. And when real trouble hits, like a genuine catastrophe? They alone stand undefatigable. The people I know who are most attuned to misery don’t seem to be able to use that familiarity to avoid the worst outcomes in practice. If anything they crumple faster.
I’m going to register it now. For the next 12 months, I will make a conscious attempt to feel actively good about what I’m doing in the moment. It is easy to push myself into that zone with just a few seconds of thought. One way or another I suspect I will walk out with some very important knowledge about the nature of human endeavors.