The things we yearn for (probably) won't make us happy

Profound(ish) thoughts or the moans of a privileged brat... I'll leave it to you to decide

At the beginning of this year, I bumped into a friend I haven't seen in years. We arranged to go for a drink. She kicked off our catch up by telling me she had read the piece I had written about buying a flat and said: 'You have your own home. How does it feel? You must be so happy.' 

I paused, trying to assess my feelings, and replied: 'Well, no. I really wanted a flat and I'm glad I got it but it hasn't made me happy.' 

There were a few seconds of awkwardness - the kind that comes when you answer a polite question with unvarnished honesty - and I went on, ‘Do the things we yearn for ever make us happy?’

It was a question that had been swimming around my mind for a while. Why did the things I desired with a white knuckle desperation not make me happy yet certain things that had entered my life unbidden brought me joy like I’d never known?

I had wanted my own flat feverishly. The desire set in when I lived in New York and returned to England for the holidays. I felt like the odd one out among my friends, almost all of whom were clambering on to the property ladder (it seemed - now I look back and realise I had plenty of friends who were in the same boat as me and I wonder why I couldn’t see that at the time?). But anyway, every time I came home, another pal had crossed over to the other side and every single fucking conversation seemed to be about mortgage rates and house prices. 

(As a nation we talk way too much about buying houses. When we could discuss anything - the world domination of Taylor Swift, that weird sex dream about a former colleague - why are we always rabbiting on about Rightmove?!)

The desire only intensified when I moved back. I was living in a flat with a sweet girl I’d met at a yoga retreat but I felt the impermanence of my situation. I was fearful of forever shuffling from house share to house share, ready to live alone but gulping at the cost of solo rent, and, I suppose, I wanted some stability. By that point, I'd lived in 10 different homes with 18 different flatmates in just over a decade. Many of those house shares were dreamy (some of them were nightmares) but I was tired of my living situation forever at danger of being upended by changes in a flatmate's life. And, deep down, I was a little ashamed of having flatmates as I headed into my mid thirties. This was a stupid thing to be embarrassed by - the state of the housing crisis means many people will have flatmates into their thirties, forties and beyond. And, to illustrate the idiocy of that embarrassment, when I moved into the flat I rented alone (a jewel of a studio in Kensington Olympia) I told myself how much better dating would be now that I could bring home a boy without worrying about him running into a flatmate in the bathroom. Well, Substackers, during the year I lived all on my lonesome in that gorgeous apartment paying £1,500 a month, the grand total of boys I brought home (in that way) was... a big fat zero. 

The beautiful flat that saw no action

So I yearned away. Then - only through an inheritance and a massive withdrawal from the bank of mum and dad - I bought somewhere. I moved in and walked around in wonder thinking that I (and the bank) owned this roof and these four walls and I could paint them without losing a penny of my deposit. 

I went freelance - only possible because I had a spare room that I could let out. This flat most definitely gave me freedom to pursue something I had always wanted to do but did it give me happiness? Nah, not really. 

My cousin warned me of this. She had bought her own place a couple of years before and said: 'It's nice to have, of course, but my flat doesn't give me a hug at the end of a bad day.'¹

And so what has made me happy? The things that have brought me joy are relationships and experiences that I did not seek out. They all just kind of happened. 

I moved in with a girl in my 20s. I didn't have any great desire to live with her but I needed a room, she had one, I thought it might be a short-term fix, so I moved in. She's now one of my best friends, I'm the godmother of her daughter and that friendship has brought me delight and support I never could have predicted when I said, 'Yeah, I can move in beginning of next month?' 

Then there was my time in New York. I never plotted my way to the Big Apple. I just got an email from a boss asking me if I fancied trying it and six weeks later I was on a plane. My years there were some of the happiest of my life. 

The city that gave me joy

Then there was my Covid charm. In the autumn of 2020, I was living in an apartment, at war with my flatmate who had been my best friend but we’d fallen out (it's a long story). We needed to fill the other room. A beautiful boy, who was studying at Columbia, wanted it. We thought he was sweet, perhaps too young, but decided that having a boy in the apartment might stop us tearing each other to shreds. To this day I call him my Covid charm. I honestly do not believe I would have got through the pandemic without his kindness and humour. I love him but I never sought him out - he just wandered into my life.

I asked him his thoughts on my theory that the things we yearn for won’t make us happy, it’s the things that come unbidden that bring the joy. 

'Ooh, I love that,' he said and pointed out that when we yearn for something, we load it up with properties that it has no right to. 

We think - oh, if only I get that boy or that girl or that job, then this and this and this. The yearned for thing becomes so many other things too. And perhaps we get the boy, the girl or the job, and for sure, it’s shiny for a while and new and brilliant but soon, the dust settles, and we realise: oh yeah, I’m still me. What else is there to yearn for? 

Recommendations… 

Guys, I’ve been in a work burrow this week (and still am!) so I only have two recommendations and I’m so horrifically gauche that one of them is a piece I wrote eek. 

Why are women not having babies?

(That’s not the headline but that’s the headline I would have chosen!)

I wrote this for the Daily Mail about why so many women of my generation and the one coming up behind me simply are not having children. I found the topic fascinating - people are opting out of having kids all around the world, Europe, the US, Taiwan, South Korea etc. The reasons are complex - just how financially hard it is, the flaming nightmare that is the housing crisis, many women now have interesting jobs that they don’t want to put on pause etc. But what I was left with after I interviewed a lot of people and thought seriously about my own feelings is that having a baby is the ultimate symbol of hope - it’s a little flare going up saying: I have faith in the future. And I just don’t think there’s much hope right now - and Pope Francis agrees with me! He said: ‘The birth of children is the main indicator for measuring the hope of a people’. 

Bloody love this picture taken of me by Natasha Pszenicki (bit of a shame there’s a cot in the background lol)

‘At 45, I grieved the idea of motherhood. Then, by pure fluke, I was pregnant’

Absolutely loved this piece by Laura Barton about becoming a mother, at last, after much trying, seemingly by miracle, at 45. It’s so exquisitely written. She also addressed the common saying about how you don’t know love until you’ve had a child and says it’s not true (thank God!). 

‘I think about this a lot. How much love there is within us. How the love that I have for my son is deep and expansive and wild, but also familiar. It is both as simple and as majestic as the new morning rising.’ 

Let’s all go into this week with hearts full of love that’s like the new morning rising. Thanks as ever for reading and I’ll see you next time xxx

1. I just wanted to add in that I am well aware of the absolute shit show that is the rental market and how hard it is to buy a home for my generation and for people younger than me and how awful it is to live with the uncertainty of rent hikes and crap landlords etc. I know I’m very lucky to have been in a position to buy a flat (solely thanks to the wealth of my parents) and I would never want to minimise how frustrating and deeply unfair it is to want a place to call your own and be unable to get it through no fault of your own.