Most people think happiness is something you can get. If you reach for it hard enough – through habits, purchases, routines – it will 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, thinking positively – then happiness should appear as a reward. When it didn’t, I assumed I was failing the process. I took cold showers, fasted, journaled, and practised gratitude. The rituals multiplied. The results did not.

What hurt wasn’t the absence of happiness so much as the accusation that filled it. Our culture treats happiness as both a promise and a test: if you optimise correctly, you should feel good. If you don’t, the fault must be yours. Happiness is marketed as a birthright, but only for those who follow the right protocols.

Eventually, exhausted by chasing a feeling that refused to arrive, I swung in the opposite direction. I told myself the pursuit of happiness was childish. Superficial. That a serious life was built on sturdier materials: meaning, responsibility, endurance. I had a family. I had work. I had obligations that needed me. 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 I had been spiralling for weeks, sleep-deprived and withdrawn, convinced I could muscle my way through a low period if I stayed disciplined enough.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. He was delighted simply by being. The moment should have interrupted us. Instead, it passed straight through us.

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

That was the beginning of a different way of thinking.

What if happiness isn’t something you acquire or renounce, but something that depends on care? Care in the ordinary way we maintain anything alive. Sleep. Time. Attention. Relationships. Space. 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 and off the next and still be healthy. The more useful question becomes not Am I happy? but What am I not tending to?

Without guarantees

Another afternoon, months later, I took my son to a worn-down 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 has argued that a flourishing life consists not only of happiness, but also of meaning and psychological richness. The unsettling implication of his work is that these elements do not reliably overlap. A life can be meaningful and complex and still feel emotionally empty. I recognised myself in that description.

I had used meaning as a substitute for care. As long as my life made sense on 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 no longer believe it can be engineered, and I no longer believe it should be dismissed. What I believe now is that happiness arises from conditions, and those conditions are easy to erode without care.

Some days I feel fine. Some days I don’t. Still, I tend, knowing it may lead nowhere. The mistake wasn’t in the care, but believing it owed me something in return. Occasionally, happiness arrives with grace. When it does, I try not to interrogate it. I notice it, appreciate it, and try not to hold on when it leaves.

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