I have read, debated, listened and philosophised about hundreds of ideas around happiness. And I can’t get on board with any of them. A lot of them are completely unachievable and unrealistic or pleasure-orientated and forward-tilted, and just generally an ideal that I don’t think is a worthy or meaningful concept to strive for. But I’ve found the real, and only path to happiness.

There is a constant pressure to be positive all the time. To just miraculously transform a bad day into being good. We strive for a perfectly positive outlook and we have foolishly believed it is possible. It is not. It is the stuff of fictional fairytales. Our lives will indefinitely be full of struggles, bad days and mistakes. But, true positivity is to act despite this, to experience hardship but to move forwards, to experience pain and to accept it.

We throw the ‘are you happy’ question around constantly. Being happy is now a social status symbol. But where did this desire come from? Is happiness the very thing we should be striving for? We need to better appreciate the complexities and nuances of happiness and the fact that we have no idea what it means and that we will definitely struggle to explain and articulate it to others.