In March this year, at Mamamia, we launched the podcast But Are You Happy?
Over the first season, I sat down with eight high-profile Australians and asked the questions you're not really meant to ask. I pressed them on jealousy. And failure. And regret. I wanted to know if the moments the world told them would make them happy, actually did.
While those conversations didn't make it to people's ears until early 2023, the idea for But Are You Happy? was born years before. Maybe even decades.
I've always struggled with happiness. I can remember being in primary school and wondering whether everyone around me was feeling something I could not. There seemed to be an effortless joy, a capacity for unselfconscious, pure contentment that I wasn't sure I possessed.
In high school, that struggle intensified. Perhaps, I thought, if I just achieve something spectacular – an exam result or an award or a piece of work worthy of external praise – I'll feel it. I'll finally reach the place everyone else appears to be.
But it didn't work. It never worked. Achievement somehow didn't feel like enough, and in my case, it was tied up with the complicated reality of being a twin. There were many times when I surpassed my own expectations, but if my sister came out on top, I deemed myself a failure. Then, if I did 'win' a battle in the unspoken competition between us, I was plagued with guilt: the bittersweet knowledge that often when one of us succeeded it meant the other did not.
Still, I never talked openly about how hard I found it to be happy. It was my private shame. I figured the only thing worse than not feeling what it is we're all meant to feel is admitting to your own emptiness.
My 20s felt defined by people trying to out-do each other with success and achievement, and everyone trying to prove to each other how happy their choices made them. We splashed our university degrees and interesting jobs and moves overseas and awe-inspiring travel throughout conversations and all over social media. It was as though we were attempting to curate a life based on how it looked, with little regard for the nuances and complexity of how it felt.
Then, about three years ago, something changed.
That timing, of course, was no accident. Perhaps when humanity is afflicted by an unprecedented shared trauma – like a global pandemic – we take our armour off. We're desperate to connect. So we tell the truth.
Lunches with friends were no longer about competing for who had it all together, because none of us did. We’d laugh with the friend who thought she’d had it all and then watched as her life blew up into a million little pieces. We’d bond over the messiness we were all living through – lost jobs and lost opportunities. Lives that felt like they’d been paused. Being separated from friends and family who we’d taken for granted.
I think when the world fell apart, we all realised: what’s the point in the competitiveness and the busyness and the ambition and the fancy job title and the things we’ve all been told we want, if we don’t have what’s truly important? What’s the point in any of this if we’re not happy?
I also noticed how quickly we bond when we're vulnerable. How much more likeable we become to each other. And what a gift it is to pierce through the veneer of a person and learn that happiness is complicated. Perhaps I wasn't entirely alone in my struggle with it – perhaps none of us are.
So I pitched But Are You Happy? and with a brilliant team at Mamamia (Tia and Lize and Clare and Talecia) we made it.
I wanted to speak to the types of people who appear to have it all, and have blatant, external markers of success. Then I wanted to know whether they were actually happy. When hadn't they been? What had they grappled with privately?
Listen to episode 1 of But Are You Happy? Post continues after audio.
Over the course of those interviews, I learnt a lot about happiness. These are those lessons.
The things you think will make you happy, are often not the things that actually do.
When people look back at their lives, it's not the moments they won an award or had a double-page spread in the newspaper or were inundated with praise from adoring fans that they consider their happiest.
That's simply not how it works.
Of course, achievements like building a business or creating an award-winning TV show bring a sense of pride, and perhaps a sense of meaning. But, as cliché as it sounds, people are often happier creating the thing than being praised for the thing. The satisfaction and contentment comes from doing something you care about and feel called to do, not from being on a red carpet.
No one ever feels like they're 'there'.
A common response to the question, 'but are you happy?' seems to be, 'I'm on my way'. Or 'I'm getting there'. Or, very commonly, 'yes... but.'
We never reach a point where we've definitively and permanently found happiness. It's a transient emotional state, and by necessity, it exists alongside stress and grief and frustration and heartbreak.
We shouldn't be aiming for happiness like it's a goal we can tick off and move on from. It's an omnipresent challenge.
Money isn't everything. But it's not... nothing.
There's a saying that money can't buy happiness, and of course, that's true. But – particularly for people who didn't grow up with money – they recognise it can buy convenience. And some degree of freedom.
For people who grew up and saw the daily stress caused by not having enough money, it's dismissive to say money has no bearing on happiness.
There's a difference between how other people see you, and who you actually are.
For people with a public profile (and perhaps an increasing number of us, given how much of our lives are lived on social media) a crucial part of finding happiness is being able to separate the public and private versions of themselves.
In order to share their opinions and ideas confidently and do their job, they manufacture a type of armour or an ego. One that says: the version of me that needs to perform, or that people are feeling passionate about – whether that's positive or negative – isn't actually me. It's almost an avatar. An extension of self that needs to be impenetrable in order to continue to exist.
That way, their true self is protected, and free to be uncertain and sensitive and desperate for validation, like so many of us are.
You can't underestimate the power of strong relationships.
An abundance of research shows it's not fame or success that brings happiness, but the strength of our relationships.
The key to happiness – the experts would argue – is high quality social connections, whether that's with friends or family or a spouse.
This reality came up again and again throughout the podcast. People talked about their mothers, their partners, their friends, their kids. They also discussed the grief of heartbreak – of losing the person you had thought would be your companion for life.
It's a powerful lesson, because it's one we can all adopt. Instead of looking for happiness through our work or via external praise or by curating a life that appears to have it all, what really matters is the stuff we can't see. The quiet conversations and the reassuring hugs and having someone who knows you, really knows you, love you unconditionally.
We're currently working on season two of But Are You Happy? and no doubt there'll be more insights to be gleaned from different types of conversations. But I hope the podcast encourages listeners to talk more candidly and more openly about happiness with the people in their own lives, and have those vulnerable conversations that are, really, the only way for us to truly connect.
For more from Clare Stephens, you can listen to But Are You Happy? or follow her on Instagram.
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