why i stopped robbing myself of the small joys in life
starting with adding cream to my coffee
I went through a significant portion of my life thinking that the key to my success was delaying or abstaining from instant gratification.
In society, one of the highest forms of social clout is being so disciplined, so intensely free from the pull of instant gratification, that you’re not tethered to any external joys.
Society gives you a badge of honour for starting your day at 6 AM with a morning routine which extends until you’re finished your meditation, journalling, black coffee, freezing cold shower, and whichever other productivity hack the self-help gurus are preaching at the time.
Getting Hooked On Self-Improvement
I succumbed to this mentality for a long time — the idea that only when you relinquish pleasure and endure a torturous amount of discipline can you tap into your highest potential for success. It’s easy to fall for this notion because the self-improvement space can be very persuasive with its claims that doing these 5 things in the morning will make your day twice as productive.
We’re impressionable. We want to improve. We think: Why not try it? What do we have to lose?
The answer: not much — at first. It doesn’t cost us anything to set our alarm a couple of hours earlier and experiment with a new morning routine. But that isn’t where the downstream effects of buying into this mentality materialize.
The self-improvement space is addictive in its own way. The paradoxical effect of striving to be anti-hedonistic is that you become just as susceptible to the newest success-hack as the rest of society is to short-term pleasure. You convince yourself that the only way to stay on track with your ten-year-plan is to keep sleeping 6 hours a night by setting that alarm clock extra early, rewriting your goals every day and making sure you don’t waste a moment when you get home from work, immediately hopping on your computer to work on that side hustle. We can get hooked on “becoming a better version of ourselves” just as easily as we can get hooked on anything else. We start to feel above everyone else because we can live without the typical pleasures everyone else feels so tied to — like cream in our coffee or a sleep-in on the weekend.
But self-help in excess is just another way to make us feel good.
After listening to enough of this self-help-like advice, we begin to hear our ego say: Get up and at ’em immediately! Get that workout in! Drink your black coffee! We need to do this to be successful and to remain ahead!
While this feels good for a short time, we often fail to check in with ourselves to determine if these gratification-delaying habits are actually serving us.
I spent two years completely immersed in the world of self-help and self-development content. I tried every morning ritual under the sun. I tried various eating styles which promised improved focus and hyper-productivity, from intermittent fasting to paleo to everything in between. I believed I could handle anything — that I was an invincible warrior which no reasonable challenge could phase because I had a whole suite of self-help and productivity tools to ward off any challenge life could throw at me. I was convinced, by all the content I consumed and all the habits I’d developed which made me feel productive, that I could truly handle anything.
When Acting Invincible Leads to Burn Out
And then I burned out. Badly. I over-worked myself, put too much on my plate, barely had enough time to sleep, let alone take care of all my habits, rituals, and reflections.
The things that had once made me feel good had now paradoxically made me feel worse because I could no longer sustain them — yet they were the very reason I got myself into a position where I’d burned out in the first place! These ‘life-hacks’ which sound so sexy and tempting — things like being keto or meditating every day or managing your time like a wizard — can make us feel really good about ourselves. It feels good to stick to something because it means you have discipline and self-control.
Those traits are good. They should be celebrated. However, having a full set of rituals that make you feel like you have self-control, but don’t serve a purpose beyond that can end up causing more harm than good in the long-term.
Learning What Doesn’t Serve You — Even if the Gurus Say it Should
I realized after a while that I actually didn’t need to wake up at 6 AM every day, and truthfully, it just made me feel groggier than a couple extra hours of sleep would. I realized that meditation simply wasn’t for me, and I preferred a much more physical form of self-reflection, like swimming, which brought me both joy and mental clarity. I realized that while fancy titles and big responsibilities looked good and made me feel important, they were not always worth the personal sacrifices they required — including time with friends and family, physical and mental health, and other priorities like academics or personal projects.
Only in the aftermath of my burnout did I realize that I didn’t enjoy the things I forced myself to do every day. Worse, I didn’t find them necessary or all that helpful.
I preferred sitting in the kitchen with a housemate or family member and talking for 20 minutes over coffee instead of sitting in my room and trying to force my mind clear before my day started. I preferred going out with friends on a Saturday night, being fully present and enjoying myself, and then being motivated to get to work the next day instead of ‘sacrificing’ those nights out to work on a side project. And I realized that pouring a teaspoon of cream into my coffee made it feel like a decadent treat crafted for royalty instead of the bitter scorching fluid I’d wince at because altering its natural state was a form of short-term pleasure I was trained to fear.
The Key is Finding a Personal Balance
I realized what was important: balance. Genuine balance. Not the kind of balance that self-help content makes you feel like you have, where you’ve scheduled in a 15-minute walk around the block with a friend as your daily hit of social interaction. The kind of balance that makes you feel whole. The kind of balance which allows you to put your head on the pillow at night and feel like your actions that day were in line with your priorities.
There will obviously be times in life where this balance is skewed — where we have to focus more on our career, or family or health than another phase of life. But at those times, that asymmetry should be intentional and it should make sense with our goals. It shouldn’t simply be because we saw someone with a private jet or ripped abs waking up before sunrise and crushing a 2-hour workout.
More effective than any morning ritual or quick fix promising success is getting your priorities straight and living in alignment with those priorities.
Our lives should not become one giant puzzle of self-help advice we read on the internet, but a unique combination of what makes us feel good in the long-term and in the short-term. Keep the habits that bring joy and fulfillment into your life. Discard the ones which you dread or achieve the opposite result of what you’re intending.
It’s about finding a balance that works for us, reflecting on what feels good, and meeting ourselves in the middle. Because life is precious, and every day should be savoured in small ways.
The Little Pleasures Make Life Colourful
Enjoying things while not getting overly attached to them is part of a full and vibrant life, because we never know when everything will change and those small pleasures could become inaccessible indefinitely —a harsh reality we are experiencing for ourselves during the pandemic’s numerous lockdowns.
While life should not be a chain of actions driven by short-term pleasure, it should also not be about robbing ourselves of them to prove something.
Cream in coffee, cozy Sunday sleep-ins, and a long conversation with friends with no time limit are part of what makes life so beautiful and delicious. It’s not worth giving all of that up just to inflate our ego and “prove that we can.” We’re all complicated and unique creatures that require balance. Find yours, and lean into it.