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3MM: Simple Pleasures, The UK & Bald Men
3 MINUTE MONDAYHi friend, I’ve been thinking about the shame of simple pleasures. “I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things.” — Visakan Veerasamy We are all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large: the day we get married, the night we play the main stage at Glastonbury, the moment the business sells for $100 million. Anything less, and the entry doesn’t even make the ledger. We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. Oh, THAT little thing made your day? That small moment made your week? How feeble, how desperate, how limited your life must be to be thrilled by something so unimpressive? You must not have a lot going on. We roll our eyes at the tiny events that others get excited at, as though joy must be proportionate to scale. And yet, life is made up of little things exactly like this. Not once in a while. Always. Your life is entirely constructed out of moments so small they wouldn’t even register as events on anyone’s calendar. So why can’t something small be something great? Well… Sometimes I feel things more deeply than I should do. Including the shame at feeling things more deeply than I should do. Also including the shame of being delighted by little things more than I think I should. As if taking pleasure in something tiny reveals the smallness of my life. But maybe that’s exactly backward. Maybe the true richness of a life is how much joy you can harvest from the smallest possible patch of soil. And here’s the payoff: when you lower the threshold for joy, you don’t just get more of it, you get it now. Who is truly the more impressive person? The one who requires a huge cathedral of bullshit, fanfare and galactic accomplishments in order to get the slightest flicker of pleasure? Like some masochist at a sex party demanding car batteries get clamped onto his nipples before he can even get started? Or… the person who can do it with a good coffee and a fresh breeze? This feels like a test of emotional robustness. If the only experiences you allow to bring you joy are big, impressive, and rare, then your happiness is brittle. You’ve made it dependent on external circumstances lining up in just the right way. You’ve taken your joy hostage until the ransom note of life offers you something “sufficiently worth it.” We are already primed to be easy to trigger, just not in the right direction. We let the tiniest inconveniences ruin our mood - a slow barista, the Wi-Fi buffering, a traffic jam that adds seven minutes to our commute. Our threshold for irritation is comically low. But our threshold for joy? Absurdly high. A stranger’s smile? Doesn’t count. A great song coming on shuffle? Not enough. Landing a towel straight into the washing basket from across the room? Lame. If something as insignificant as a red light can make you snap, why can’t a good coffee make you glow? We are already easily tipped into frustration, so we must work hard to be equally easy to tip into delight. Enjoyment is a kind of efficiency. The less grandiosity you need to feel good, the more “happiness coins” you pick up across your day. How little of a thing could happen to make your day? How much excitement could you squeeze out of clean bedsheets, or the smell of rain on hot pavement, or a happy dog outside your house? Small wins might seem feeble, but refusing to take joy from mundane victories simply because they’re insufficiently grand is the same as refusing a free ride to the airport just because you’re getting on a plane when you arrive there. So… what if something small could be something great? Most people already have a high threshold for joy. Don’t make it worse by feeling shame when little things break through your defences and make you smile. .... :) MODERN WISDOMI do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent. This week’s upcoming episodes: Monday. Thursday. Saturday. THINGS I'VE LEARNED1. The 2023 Mental State of the World Report collected answers from 500,000 respondents across 71 counties. Countries were then given a Mental Health Quotient (MHQ), where the higher the score, the more satisfied the people. The UK came 2nd to last. Just above Uzbekistan, and below South Africa. Ukraine came in comfortably higher with a score of 60, despite battling Russian President Vladimir Putin's invading forces, while Yemen, which is suffering from "one of the world's largest humanitarian crises," also fared better, scoring 59. In addition, the UK also scored the highest in respondents who are “distressed and struggling”, had low Drive and Motivation Scores, and struggled heavily with Adaptability and Resilience. 2. “The left’s greatest enemy is not the right but the hard-left. The right’s greatest enemy is not the left but the hard-right. The lunatics on your own side make you look much sillier than the opposition ever could.” — Gurwinder Bhogal 3. “A 2019 paper explored how much money balding men would be willing to pay to restore their hair to its former glory. The average was a whopping US$30,000 (equivalent to nearly US$40,000 in 2025, according to ChatGPT). The paper’s title alone - Willingness Toupee - is worth the price of admission.” — Steve Stewart Williams LIFE HACKGymshark Lift London. I'm heading to London for Gymshark Lift London. Doing a conversation on stage with Sam Sulek, and another with CBum. Come thru. Big love, Try my productivity drink Neutonic. PS |
3 Minute Monday
Podcaster with 1bn+ plays. I write about the most important lessons from the best thinkers on the planet. 300,000+ people read my free newsletter. Press subscribe to join.
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