Most people think happiness is something you can get. If you reach for it hard enough – through habits, purchases, routines – it’ll eventually land in your hands.

I believed that. When it didn’t work, I reached a different conclusion: happiness must not be very important.

Both ideas failed me.

For a long time, I treated happiness as proof. If I were living right – eating well, exercising, meditating – then happiness should appear as a reward. When it didn’t, I assumed I was failing the process. I took cold showers, fasted, journaled. The rituals multiplied. The results didn’t.

What hit wasn’t the absence of happiness so much as the blame that filled it. Our culture treats happiness as a promise: if you optimise correctly, you should feel good. But it also comes as a test: if you don’t, the fault is yours. Happiness is marketed as a birthright, but only for those who follow the ‘right’ protocols.

Eventually, exhausted by chasing a feeling that never seemed to arrive, I swung in the opposite direction. I told myself the pursuit of happiness was superficial. That a serious life was built on sturdier things: meaning, responsibility, endurance. I had a family, work, obligations. Happiness, I decided, was optional.

This belief was easier to live with. It gave me reasons (commitment, growth, duty) to explain why feeling flat didn’t matter. But it also came with a cost.

What passed through

When my son was one, my spouse and I argued – rare in our sixteen years together. I had been spiralling for weeks, sleep-deprived and withdrawn, convinced I could muscle my way through a low period if I stayed stoic enough. I hadn’t noticed how brittle I’d become until I cracked that afternoon.

As we sparred and cried, our son stood in his playpen, gripping the bars. He let go, fell, laughed, and tried again. The moment should have interrupted us. Instead, it passed right through.

Later, I realised there had been happiness in that room, and I had been unavailable to it.

That was the beginning of a different way of thinking.

What if happiness isn’t something you achieve or denounce, but something that depends on care? Care in the ordinary way we tend to anything alive. Rest. Attention. Kindness. None of these guarantees happiness. But neglect them long enough, and happiness becomes unlikely.

Seen this way, happiness resembles health more than wealth. It can’t be reduced to a single metric. You can excel in one area and struggle in another. You can feel fine one day, be off the next, and still be healthy. The more useful question becomes not “Am I happy?” but “What do I need to tend?”

Grace, not guarantees

Another afternoon, I took my son to a neighbourhood playground. Nothing out of the ordinary, the equipment was rusty, the weather unremarkable. Watching him play, I felt a brief, expansive vividness: a sense of well-being that arrived without effort or explanation.

It didn’t feel earned. It didn’t correspond to any insight or improvement. Happiness appeared neither when I chased it nor when I dismissed it, but when the conditions happened – almost accidentally – to be right.

Psychologist Shigehiro Oishi argues that a flourishing life consists not only of happiness, but also of meaning and psychological richness. The unsettling implication is that the three don’t necessarily overlap. A life can be meaningful and complex and still feel emotionally empty.

I’d used meaning as a substitute for care. As long as my sense made sense of paper, I told myself it didn’t matter how it felt. But feelings, like bodies, keep their own accounts. Ignored long enough, they return as irritability, distance, resentment; a quiet thinning of presence.

I don’t have a formula for happiness. I don’t believe it can be acquired, but I don’t believe it should be ignored. What I believe now is that happiness arises from conditions, and these conditions are easily eroded without care.

Some days I feel fine. Some days I don’t. Still, I tend to body and soul, knowing it may lead nowhere. The mistake wasn’t in the caring, but expecting it to deliver something in return. Occasionally, happiness arrives. When it does, I try not to interrogate it. I hold it close when it’s here, and try not to hold on when it leaves.

One evening, I watch my son dance – one foot swinging in front of the other, hands raised, unsteady and intent, a smile on his face.