Why you are happier than you think – according to science

When Lorraine Candy lost her high-powered job she thought it was a disaster – but then something strange happened. By being forced to stop striving in mid-life she discovered a new way of living that delivered more contentment than she had ever experienced before

Candy: Being happy with your lot is harder than it looks (iStock/Getty)

In the immediate aftermath of the loss of my 30-year career I feared I may drown in a river of feelings of failure, that I’d be swept away by a sadness that would penetrate all areas of life. When your identity is as strongly tied to your job as mine had been since the age of 16 it is hard to imagine a happy normality without it. But something unexpected happened in the months after I was made redundant from my magazine editing role; I found myself heartily warming to the idea that satisfaction with what I had, instead of striving for more at work, was making me happy.

How strange. I felt illogically liberated by the loss of my career coat-of-armour, which was unexpected. I began to “switch states” as the therapists call it and started to live in the moment, which is very unlike me. I started revelling in small daily joys, often doing things like getting up to watch a sunrise in my slippers in the garden, I said no to big projects that would have consumed me like my job had before, I had Fridays off. I became, dare I say it, a little dull in my early fifties.

But it turns out, that I was onto something. This week a new survey I’m labelling “A Manifesto for Being Boring” discovered that satisfaction is now the UK’s main marker for success. In other words, we no longer need to strive for “more” to be happy in life, we can instead settle for “enough”. In our wobbly post-pandemic, Brexit-battered uncertain world of wars and climate disasters, the seed of hope is that feeling satisfied with your lot – even though you know “your life could be better” (as the survey questionnaire put it) – is good for you.