I've been trying to create a sustainable, consistent routine for myself lately. This may be a fool's errand in the face of chronic illness and the state of the world. However, in the last couple of months, I've found a lot of solace in routine (even mundane) days. It's not a revolutionary idea, but the real switch for me has been thinking of the habits that make up this routine as morally neutral. For example, I have no great love for flossing my teeth or drinking water, but they're not things I avoid either. I know in some general sense that things like this are good for me and I feel better after having done them.
The difference now is that I no longer see completion of these kind of tasks as virtuous, or the lack of doing them as a personal failing. I've always been a compulsive flosser, but if I were truly honest with myself, I think I did it out of a sense of obligation, even shame: I ought to do this because it's what healthy, well-adjusted people do. My dentist would be so disappointed! And what if I breathe on someone with halitosis? Sure, it's good for my health, but the invocation of health was mostly a mechanism of self-shame rather than care: good people were healthy. Good people took care of their health. That means they flossed. If you do not floss your teeth, you are not a good person.
Seeing these tasks as morally neutral, for me, is the purposeful act of detaching these actions from reflecting on yourself as a person. For example: people who wake up at 5 am every day to go for a 7-mile run are no better than those who wake up at 11 am to slowly plop themselves in front of a computer. The world certainly caters more to the early riser and praises their discipline to exercise (cf. every CEO's morning routine as described in airport books). But in this paradigm of moral neutrality, the early bird is no better of a person than the night owl for waking up early, much less to exercise. You could make the argument in this example that the billionaire CEO can only do so because of their grotesque wealth, and that they do far more damage to the world than the night-shift nurse who wakes up at 11 am every day because of their grueling hours. This is a true statement. However, the difference for me is realizing that wake-up time—regardless of its necessity or practice—is not a marker of being a "better" person.
This may be entirely obvious, even trivial. If that is you, please know that I am incredibly jealous. Without getting too sidetracked—this could really be the subject of another post—there is a long historical association between morality, cleanliness, and productivity. A person's environment was a reflection of their values, and those values could be a form of moral and literal pestilence. KC Davis does a magnificent job of challenging this narrative in How to Keep House While Drowning, which I highly recommend for anyone who struggles with their mental health and finds it difficult to...well, keep house. Taking care of your teeth or having a tidy living space isn't about being a better person who can or does do these things, but a gift that you give yourself. Cleaning isn't a moral good. It's something you do for your future self to make them a little more comfortable.
What does this have to do with happiness?
I used to think that becoming a better person would make me a happier one. If I just had the discipline to get up at the same time every day, exercise, and put on an outfit I had ironed and laid out for myself yesterday, it must mean that I am stable enough to be happy. That's the one promise of nearly every self-help book I've slurped up in the last decade or so: if you change your life or mindset in some way, you'll be a healthier, happier, more productive person. You'll be able to be more present in your relationships. You will enjoy life more. You'll be a better person because of it.
I won't deny that some of the things I've mentioned above are beneficial to one's health, and for the people who have the space and resources to do so, doing many of these tasks is net positive. What I want to challenge instead is this equivalence between healthier, happier, and better. "All I want is to be happy," I'd say. I thought about it as Maslow's hierarchy of needs: if I fulfilled all of my physiological, relational, etc. needs, then I could work on self-actualization, the pinnacle of being happy. It's the pursuit of happiness! We've made it!
This is, of course, hogwash.
"Once I can really sustain this routine and be more emotionally stable," I'd said to my therapist, "then I can really start working on finding joy." "That's not how that works," she'd said. "You know that you can't just will yourself into happiness, and frankly speaking, becoming happy through trying to pursue happiness just isn't possible." I looked confused. That's when she hit me with the zinger.
"Happiness is a byproduct of the choices you make, not a goal in and of itself."
Like respect, emotional validation, or sleep: the more you want it, the less likely you are to get it. Happiness isn't an achievement or an end state, but something that may come from the choices you make that feel true to yourself. As such, I've been trying to think of academic work lately as a crossword puzzle: it's a clearly bounded exercise, with white spaces to fill in based on clues. It doesn't really matter whether or not the answers are correct—I might have to take some extra time to fix that section—and even so, no one is going to give me a prize for finishing it. I might feel pretty good for finishing, especially if it's the Sunday puzzle. There are zillions of other people who've finished it faster (and in ink!), and there is an entire subculture devoted to this, but I feel no need to participate. Finishing a puzzle makes me no better than anyone else; it just means that I completed a task that is sometimes pretty hard.
It doesn't have to mean anything, because—cynically—it doesn't. There was a puzzle, and I solved it. Maybe, somewhere on the way, I'll find joy and happiness in it.