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.

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 I had been spiralling for weeks, sleep-deprived and withdrawn, convinced I could muscle my way through a low period if I stayed stoic enough.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.

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

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.

The next obvious step is to say: so I learned to take care of myself. But that’s optimisation again, wearing softer clothes. Sleep more, be mindful, practice kindness – and wait for happiness to appear.

The difference I’ve come to is not between strict protocols and fuzzy ones. I sleep because a body needs sleep. I pay attention to my son because attention is love in practice. I’m kind to my wife because that’s who I want to be. None of this is a code. None of it comes with a guarantee. The moment it becomes a contract with an expectation, it collapses back into the logic it was supposed to escape.

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. Care alone doesn’t cover it. But care is what I was missing.

Another afternoon, I took my son to a neighbourhood playground. The equipment was rusty, the weather hot and dry, the rubber padding peeling off in patches. 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.

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.

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.