April 22, 2025 • 37 mins
What will make me truly happy?
Recently I watched an Instagram reel where a psychologist shared data that suggests parents with young children are not as happy as those couples who are child-free or who have grown kids. In the comments section, you could hear the defensiveness. The frustration. The incredulity from parents of young children who felt misrepresented.
As someone with young children myself, I could see that many of us were grasping for how to explain why this wasn’t the whole picture. Of course there are some elements of “happiness” that go by the wayside when you have kids. At the same time, having young kids is a time of profound transformation and meaning (the elements of a great story).
I wanted to speak to this — not because I have any interested in convincing someone to have children — but because I think the conversation itself is fundamentally flawed.
What if asking the question, ‘what will make me happy?’ is actually making us miserable?
What if there’s a better question to ask?
I’ll unpack that better question in today’s episode.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
Follow Ally on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allyfallon/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to tackle
a pretty big topic. I want to talk about happiness.
But I want to talk about happiness as it relates
to what this podcast is really about, which is about
taking our agency and using it to shape our stories,
(00:47):
to quote unquote write our stories, even if we're not
literally writing a book and writing a story. I want
to talk about what it means to shape your story
as it relates to happiness. So what role does happiness
act play when it comes to shaping our stories? Are
we shaping our stories in such a way where happiness
is paramount or does happiness even matter for a meaningful story?
(01:10):
This is what I want to unpack today. And I
got inspired to talk about this topic because of something
that I saw on Instagram. I was just sort of
casually scrolling Instagram at the end of the day, as
I do sometimes to decompress after getting my kids to bed,
and I saw a reel that Adam Grant had posted.
Adam has, you know, almost three million followers. You may
(01:31):
already follow him, but he is an organizational psychologist. He's
an author who's written a really popular book. He has
actually written a couple of books, and he was interviewing
another psychologist and they were talking about happiness as it
relates to being a parent. So of course this caught
my attention because usually when I'm scrolling Instagram, it's because
I'm so exhausted from a day of chasing my two
(01:53):
young kids around that I just need something really mindless
and passive to do, so that's usually why I'm sc Instagram.
So this was me that night. I had just gotten
my kids to bed. It had been a really good
but a full, exhausting, tiring, long day. Then bedtime you
parents out there, No bedtime is always a struggle, no
matter how good the day has been. Like if you
(02:14):
have a great day, bedtime is horrible because the kids
don't want to go to bed because they're having so
much fun. And if you've had a really hard day,
bedtime is horrible because the kids are like completely melting
down and have lost all sense of calm in their
bodies and are just regulated and just you know, it's
just a nightmare and it kind of no matter how
you swing it. And my husband and I have gone
around the block over the years with bedtime. We used
(02:36):
to have these really long bedtimes that were like extremely frustrating,
and we would trade off. We would argue over, you know,
who is going to do bedtime tonight, and sort of
like barter with bedtime. It would be like, all do
the dishes for a month if you do bedtime tonight.
And then more recently we started working with a parent coach,
which is like a whole other episode I could talk
about that, but this parent coach helped us to do
(02:58):
a better job of setting boundaries with our kids, and
it was so incredible and amazing, and bedtimes became much
lighter and easier to handle. And yet still even with
the boundaries in place, even with our better bedtimes that
are no longer two hours long but that now are
like twenty minutes, even still bedtime is just sort of
a thing at the end of the day. So I
(03:18):
had just done this bedtime routine, I had just gotten
the two kids to sleep, I settled into my bed.
I'm scrolling Instagram, and all of a sudden, I'm watching
Adam Grant interview this other psychologist asking him questions about
parenting and happiness. And one of the things that I
heard this psychologist say that I guess you could say
was kind of triggering for me, was that you ask
(03:42):
parents if having children has made them happier, and they
will tell you yes, But when you actually look at
the data, the truth is having kids doesn't make you happier,
that happiness tends to improve when your kids are grown
and leave the house. And so I just saw the
short clip of the interview. I didn't watch the entire interview.
I still haven't watched the entire interview, but I was
(04:05):
just noticing how this conversation that the two of them
were having was feeling kind of triggering to me. And
I imagine this would be triggering for most parents, because
you have like such adoration and love, like an unspeakable,
unexplainable amount of love type of love, unconditional love for
your kids. They in every way that you can imagine
(04:25):
make your life better and richer and more incredible. And
so to hear someone say kids don't really make you
happier is a wild thing to hear someone say, and
you kind of want to I immediately went to the
comments because I was like, I want to see what
other people are saying about this. So this is what
we do on Instagram, right, we go straight to the comments.
We're like, am I crazy? Or are other people also
(04:46):
feeling this way about this content? And sure enough in
the comments, there's a lot of parents saying, you know,
I don't know about you, but my kids make me
infinitely happier. I'm happier now than I was before. And
then there are other people in the comments saying like,
why are all the parents here getting so defensive? So
it just got me thinking about the nuance of this
topic and of this idea of happiness. I want to
(05:08):
expand the topic of happiness beyond just having kids, because
this isn't really an episode. It's not a podcast about this,
and it's not an episode trying to convince someone who's
on the fence about having kids to have kids, or
someone who's chosen not to have kids to have kids,
or anything like that. I feel like, you know, if
you have decided that you do not want to have children,
then more power to you. Please don't have children, because
(05:30):
it will. You know, even even wanting kids, it has
rocked my world and challenged me in ways that I
couldn't have imagined, even like desperately for a decade, more
than a decade, like begging God to give me children.
Even still having kids has really surprised me with how
challenging and difficult it can be. So it's not about
convincing someone to do something that they don't otherwise want
(05:53):
to do. But I do want to talk about the
nuance of a word like happiness and talk about like,
is how happiness even really the goal? Because if you
have these two different perspectives, parents in the comments saying yeah, sure,
life has changed so much since I've had kids, and
I have less freedom, you know, I travel less and
(06:17):
I do less fun things with my friends, And yet
I would pick this a thousand times over. There has
to be something there. And it really got me thinking
about this idea even in my own personal experience, because yeah,
in certain ways, when you measure my life before kids
versus now with kids, in certain ways my life was
quote unquote better back then, and yet my life is richer, deeper,
(06:39):
more fulfilling, infinitely more like just full, just fun and
full and wonderful now than it was back then. And
yet I also am not denying that it's also exhausting,
and I'm not denying that it's also really frustrating, and
I'm also not denying that it's also confining. You know,
I miss probably more than anything else, maybe two things
(07:02):
I miss more than anything else from pre child life.
One is freedom, and that includes like spontaneity, because I
just don't have that in my life. I feel like
when I had one child, I had a little bit
of it still where Matt and I could kind of
pick up and just be like we're just going to
go out for the day and just you know, like
get the car seat and pack the diaper bag and
(07:23):
we're just going out for the day and she'll nap
on the go and no problems. And then when I
had two children, I really felt that sense of anchoring,
like you can't just pick up and go. There are
too many logistics, there's too much you have to bring.
It's too challenging, it's too complicated. It's not the same.
It doesn't have that same lightness and freedom that it
did back before we had children, and so I felt
(07:45):
that anchoring happen when I had my second child. So freedom.
And then the other piece of that is community. And
this is something that I really want to spend a
minute talking about on today's episode because I think it
plays a massive role in happiness. And I think our
culture does a really, really terrible job of facilitating community,
particularly for parents, and particularly for parents of young kids.
(08:09):
I think our culture does a terrible job of facilitating
community for young parents. And because of that, parenting in
particular motherhood, or if you're the primary caregiver of your children,
that can be an extremely isolating experience. And as I
was thinking about what makes people happy, why does happiness matter?
(08:30):
Why are we even talking about happiness the nuances of happiness,
I was thinking, gosh, like, that's a big piece of this,
a big piece of why I might say I feel
less happy at times now than I did before, Because
before having kids, I could facilitate my own community. I
could get out of my house and go to a
yoga studio, I could go to a church community, I
(08:52):
could go to an outing. I could go to a restaurant,
I could go to a bar, I could go meet people.
I could just go to a concert, a venue, go out,
walk around the town, go shopping, go to the mall,
whatever I wanted to do, and be in community with
other people. And then having children. And I'll get into
this later in the episode because I want to talk
(09:12):
about this as a kind of separate topic. But I
have felt as a mother the way that our culture
feels about mothers bringing young children into those spaces. I mean,
some of the spaces are just an automatic noe for kids,
like a bar, for example, but even a mall. If
you're a mother of young kids, I know you have
(09:34):
felt this where when you bring your young kids into
a space like a restaurant or a mall where other
people are there, you feel the sense that all eyes
are on you and they're expecting your kids to act
in a way that kids just don't know how to act.
And they're expecting your kids not to make noise or
not to bother them, or not to be an inconvenience,
or not to be too loud or whatever. And that
(09:57):
feeling that you have as a prime very parent is
extremely overwhelming. And makes you much less likely to come
and participate in those spaces. And so then motherhood or
parenthood becomes extremely isolating and that can play a role
in our happiness. So those two things, freedom and then community,
have been the two things that have been the biggest
(10:19):
adjustment for me coming into motherhood. And yeah, of course
those things would have an impact on happiness. So if
you're asking moms, you're asking dads, and I mean, I
know this can be a really different experience for moms
and dads too, depending on how the household is set up,
where sometimes moms have a whole different experience of motherhood
than dads do of fatherhood. For a lot of dads,
(10:39):
life goes on as normal after you have kids. You
still go to work, you still you know, you might
have small adjustments to make, But for a lot of
dads the adjustment is not as big as it is
for moms. And so it might depend on who you're asking.
Are you asking mom if her happiness or quality of
life has changed? Or are you asking dad if his
quality of life has changed? In our house, it's been
(11:00):
very fifty to fifty. Matt has at different points been
the quote primary parent or the stay at home parent
while I have continued on working, and at other points
I've been the state at home parent. Well, Matt has
continued on working, and we've kind of tag teamed those things.
And even you know, Matt and I have had a
lot of discussions about this because we're moving into a
season where he's stepping into more of the primary breadwinner
(11:23):
position and I'm stepping into more of the primary parent position.
And yet Matt, because he's been the primary parent and
he has the awareness of what it looks like to
be a primary parent, he also knows how to support
me without me having to say to him like, hey,
could you do this or could you do this? Matt
knows how to step in and support me as the
primary parent in ways that make my quality of life
(11:46):
a lot better. During the day when he's gone for
let's say eight hours, it's not always eight hours. Sometimes
it's ten and sometimes it's six, but he will do
things like make lunches ahead of time the night before,
or like prep the breakfast, or you know, get the
laundry moving, or or he comes home and he does bedtime.
Since I've been with the kids all day, so there
are things that he can do as the primary breadwinner
(12:07):
that helped to support me as the primary parent, and
he has an intuition about those things that he wouldn't
have otherwise had if we hadn't have traded off the
way that we have in our relationship. So again, I'm
just bringing this up to say, like, there are a
lot of things that impact the happiness of a parent,
and this is one of them. Anyway, I don't want
to spend this whole episode talking about the idea of
(12:28):
having kids or not having kids, but I bring this
up to say there are a lot of different things
that could impact how happy someone is as a parent,
and one of them could be how supportive their partner is.
How much does your partnership been in help with household
duties or do they see it as their responsibility or
are they waiting for you to kind of make them
a list and give them their honeydew list for what's
theirs to do? You know, do you have a partner
(12:49):
who travels all the time, that's another big stressor on
the parent who's home. So so many different nuances here
to why a parent might report that they were happier
before they had kids then after. But it's not really
the main thing I want to talk about. The main
thing I want to talk about is how are we
even defining happiness and what is it that really makes
(13:10):
us happy? Because I think that we have these cultural
ideas of what makes us happy, that we'll be happy
if we can get what we want, if we can
achieve what we want in our life, then we'll be happy.
And this is assuming that we even know what we want.
And as I was thinking about recording this episode, I
was thinking a lot about my dad, who, if you
(13:30):
have been listening for a while, you know, is no
longer with us. I lost my dad last October. My
dad and I would have very let's call them robust conversations, intense,
lovingly intense conversations about this topic because my dad was
cut from a little bit of a different cloth than me.
I mean, I think in a lot of ways we
were similar. But my dad's favorite book of all time
(13:52):
was M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. The first
sentence of that book I can recite from memory because
it's been recited to me so many times in my
forty one years of life, which is that life is difficult.
That's the first sentence of M. Scott pex The Road
Less Traveled, which was my dad's favorite book. Life is difficult,
And my dub would always say that life is difficult.
Life is difficult. Life is difficult, And I think as
(14:15):
a bit of a rebellion to that wanted my dad
to see, or wanted him to acknowledge, or wanted him
to accept that life could also be beautiful, and life
could be so full of you know, pleasure and joy,
and that you could have the things that you wanted
to have, and you could go out there and create
the reality that you were wanting to experience. And I
(14:39):
lived my life from that place of maybe sort of
trying to convince my dad or convince myself that this
other way of being was also possible. That you could
go out and you know, manifest the experiences that you
wanted to have, and you could travel everywhere and you
can meet these amazing people and you could experience pleasure
and joy and happiness. And yet the more life I've lived,
(14:59):
and the more you as I've been on this planet,
the more I realize that my dad and I were
both right. In other words, life is difficult, and also
there's so much pleasure to be found yes, life is difficult,
and also you can go create the things that you want. Yes,
we are the authors of our stories. We are the
creator of our own reality, our own existence. And also
(15:21):
part of how we experience meaning and joy in our
lives is through moving through the difficulty. If you think
about the write your story framework, even it's the problems
in the story that create the tension that transforms the hero.
(15:43):
The hero transforms because of difficulty, because of tension, and
without that tension, I've said a thousand times, the story
falls flat and it's just uninteresting. It doesn't really grip
us or engage us. And so yes, in some ways
my life life has become more challenging in many ways,
actually my life has become more challenging and difficult since
(16:04):
having children. And yet at the same time, when I
look back at my life pre children, especially by the
time that I had met Matt, I'd had a couple
of years of doing pretty much whatever I wanted, whenever
I wanted, with whoever I wanted. I'd had a few
years of traveling wherever I wanted to go, to really
beautiful locations, to you know, creating a life of pleasure
(16:26):
and ease and spontaneity and freedom and fun and people
and you know, having these incredible experiences, and I was
so happy. I had all the happiness that anyone could
ever ask for. I had privilege, I had money, There
was flow in my life. I was, you know, falling
in love with Matt. There were so many beautiful things
about my life at that time, and I wouldn't change
(16:48):
a single second of it. And yet when I look
at how my life has transformed since having kids, I
realized that the happiness that I had achieved back then
satisfies only to a certain extent. It is fun, and
it is satisfying, but only to It'd be like eating,
you know, the same meal over and over again for
(17:09):
the rest of your life, even if it's your favorite meal.
It's a delicious meal, but at some point you just go, yeah,
I'm interested in some contrast. I'm interested in something a
little bit different, and having kids for me has provided
that contrast. It's provided you know, even think about what
I said before about how having my second child kind
of anchored me. It created this necessity to sit still,
(17:31):
stay still, create routine, do the same thing every day,
which was in contrast to my life before, where I
was just flitting around from place to place all the time.
I mean, I never had any reason to be tied down.
I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And
having children gave me this anchor that forced me to
experience contrast, and experiencing that contrast has taken me deeper.
(17:55):
It has changed who I am. It has made me
a better person. It's made me stronger. It's taught me
so many things about life and about how the world works.
It's shown me things I never would have been able
to see without the contrast. So yes, in certain ways,
surface level ways, having kids has made me less happy,
I guess, And yet it has also opened up my world,
(18:17):
expanded my world, expanded me to become someone new that
I never could have become without my children. Now. One
comment that I will often get if I post something
like that online, which I have before, talking about how
my kids have really challenged me and opened me and
expanded me and made me someone better, people will say, well,
(18:38):
can't you do that without having kids? Yes, of course,
there are so many experiences in life, but beyond having
kids that can also expand you. One experience that expanded
me in my life was travel. So travel also at
a time in my life, provided a contrast that I
hadn't experienced before. I grew up in a fairly altered environment.
(19:01):
I guess that's fair to say. I grew up in
the suburbs and in the church and in a small
community that was relatively safe and loving and just exactly
the kind of space that you would want your children
to grow up in. And yet I hadn't really traveled
many places or experienced the world until I was in
my twenties. And then I wanted to go to Europe,
(19:22):
and I wanted to go to China, and I wanted
to go, you know, see the world and travel all
over the place. And I did that, and it provided
me experiences that were in contrast to what I had
experienced before. It provided me experiences like going, you know,
an extra couple of hours without a meal, for example,
when you're traveling, you don't always have access to food
immediately right there. You don't always have access to the
(19:44):
food that you want to eat. There are so many
experiences in our lives that can provide us with that
contrast that don't have to be having children. It could
be travel for you, It could be an experience that
we would otherwise call negative, like maybe you're diagnosed with
a terminal illness or with a serious illness. When I
was in my mid twenties, I was told that I
had dietary fructose intolerance, which is an intolerance to the
(20:07):
sugar called fructose, which meant, according to my doctor, that
I could never eat fruit, never eat most vegetables, never
eat anything with high fructose corn syrup in it. And
I had to go on a long journey of first,
you know, cutting all those things out of my diet
and then sort of finding other health practitioners who could
help me figure out like what was really going on
with my body. And that whole journey was it pleasurable? No,
(20:31):
you know, I spent years eating like only five foods
that I could eat without my stomach hurting or without
like just being in severe pain or without feeling like
extremely lethargic. And that whole journey was extremely frustrating and
upsetting and felt unfair at times. And you know, I
went through my whole mental process with it. And yet
at the end of the day, it also was an
(20:52):
experience that helped me grow and helped me expand, and
helped me become the woman who I am today. So
if we're living our lives only sort of seeking happiness only,
sort of seeking the things that we know are going
to give us pleasure or make us happy. And this
is Victor Frankel's whole thing too, man search for meaning,
which is a lot of where this Write your Story
framework came from. This is Victor Frankele's whole message is
(21:16):
that what you are craving is not just pleasure. What
you are craving is not just happiness. What you are
craving is meaning. And a life that is rich in
meaning becomes a life that has the capacity to handle
pain and suffering with grace and with relative ease. A
(21:37):
life becomes a life that has the capacity to handle
frustration like a bedtime where your kids are not listening
to you and it takes you an hour to get
them to sleep. Your life has the capacity to hold
that because it also has so much meaning and so
much richness and so much love inside of it that
(21:58):
it just can hold all of that challenge and difficulty.
And I think the older I get, the more I
realized that my dad was really onto something with the
idea that life is difficult. You know, life serves you
up difficulties. The nuance I would bring to this conversation
that I didn't have to bring when I was in
my twenties sitting arguing with my dad about this is this,
(22:22):
You don't have to go out and stir up your
own difficulty in your life, because life will dish it
up for you every life, every person I've ever known,
no matter how privileged, no matter how wealthy, no matter
how insulated, no matter what, every human being who walks
the face of this planet, who lives a life, will
(22:42):
encounter difficulty. Now, the measure of difficulty you encounter may
be different depending on where on the planet you live,
depending on how many resources you have, depending on a
lot of different factors. But the level of difficulty that
you encounter also matches the level of the capacity you
(23:06):
have to expand and to grow. So the more we
insulate ourselves from difficulty, the more we limit our own expansion.
Difficulty is inevitable, and I do agree with M. Scott
Peck and with my dad that life is full of difficulty.
Difficulty is going to be dished up to you on
a silver platter at many different times in your life.
And it's going to come in a bunch of different packages,
(23:28):
and it's going to look a bunch of different ways.
The factor of how happy, truly happy you are in
your life is not a matter of how little difficulty
you can receive. It's a matter of how you respond
to the difficulty. So this isn't really a conversation about
kids or no kids. Again, this is not an issue
where I'm like trying to convince anyone to have kids
(23:49):
who doesn't want to have kids, or anything like that.
It was just an experience I had as I was
sitting there in my bed after the difficulty of getting
my kids to go to sleep, watching this reel that's
talking about how parents are less happy than those who
either choose never to have kids or those whose kids
have launched into the world, that that's when happiness spikes.
That I just thought, what a sort of pointless conversation
(24:12):
about who's happier people who have kids or people who
don't have kids, Because you know, if we're talking about kids,
that's one thing for the most part. Yet you have
a choice about whether you want to have kids or not,
or most of us do. In the modern world, we
have access to resources like birth control that can help
us to make those choices whether or not we want
to have kids. And yet there are so many instances
(24:34):
in life where things happen to us that we do
not have control over that could impact our quote unquote happiness.
You know, is someone happier with cancer or without cancer.
Is someone happier, you know, with ailing parents or without
ailing parents? Is someone happier in a happy relationship or
in a tense relationship. And yet there are things in
(24:55):
our lives that we just don't have control over. We
don't have control over who our parents are, We don't
have control over whether or not we get an illness.
So if we're waiting for life to be in the
perfect set of circumstances so that we can experience happiness,
we will be waiting a really, really long time. And
if instead we're able to see our lives through the
lens of life, is going to dish up lots of
(25:16):
difficulty to me. And you know what, the joy is
found in creating the capacity to hold the difficulty. Whatever
the difficulty is, whatever package it comes in, however it
shows up in my life, whether it's because of my children,
whether it's because of my health, whether it's because of
my relationships, whether it's because of my job, whether it's
because of my finances, whatever it is, however the difficulty
(25:38):
shows up, my joy in life is not dependent on
those circumstances, but it's dependent on how I choose to
see the difficulty. Can I hold the difficulty? Can I
receive it? Can I receive what's trying to show me,
what it's trying to teach me? Can I become the
kind of hero who transforms enough to transcend the difficulty
(26:01):
on the other side of it? And in order to
become that type of person, I may need to be
someone who faces difficulty every single day with grace and
compassion in my life. I may need to be become
someone who faces difficulty every single day with truth in
my life. And I can speak from experience having two
(26:21):
young kids that having kids at three and four and
every age before. I can't speak to older kids because
I haven't had older kids yet, but having kids at
every age leading up to three and four has added
tremendous complication, chaos, noise, difficulty, challenge to my life. And
(26:43):
it's a challenge that I would never trade for a
million years. It has made me infinitely happier. It has
made me so much stronger, It has made me a
better person on all fronts. It has changed me from
the inside out. I'm a completely different person now than
I was before having children. And it doesn't have to
(27:05):
be children. But whatever difficulty you are facing, maybe the
conversation shouldn't be how do we avoid this difficulty? But
maybe it should be how do I face the difficulty
with discipline? How do I face the difficulty with compassion?
How do I face the difficulty with softness? How do
I fully receive what my life is trying to offer
me through this difficulty? Maybe it shouldn't be about how
(27:28):
do we avoid the pain? How do I avoid the heartbreak?
How do I live a life where I never have
to face anything challenging or difficult, where I never have
to experience that contrast, where I never have to do
anything I don't want to do. That's one way we
could live our life, or we could live our life
through the lens of life is going to dish me
up lots of difficulty. What am I going to do
with it? How am I going to show up in
(27:50):
light of the difficulty? How am I going to allow
my character to develop inside of this difficulty. And again,
as Victor frankl would say, it's not happiness that you're
looking for, it's not happiness that you're craving. It's meaning
that you're craving. And meaning comes through facing the difficulty
in our life with an open heart, with an open mind,
(28:13):
with an open spirit, receiving what the difficulty is here
to show us. I said, I would circle back to
this later in the episode, and I do want to
spend a minute talking about how our culture avoids supporting
(28:33):
parents and young families, because I think there's a parallel
here to how our culture sees happiness versus meaning. I
think as a culture, we trend toward the idea that
if I can just control my circumstances, I can be happy,
I won't ever have to face difficulty, and I'm going
to live a great life. I think as a culture,
we have just sort of bought in to that narrative.
(28:56):
And like I mentioned in last week's episode, we have
the privilege of buying into this narrative because we live
in a culture where, for the most part, we have
been insulated from extreme difficulty. We haven't had wars that
are fought on our soil. In my lifetime, we are
a very wealthy country where there are a lot of
broken aspects to healthcare and other part you know, politics
(29:19):
and whatever else. And yet we live in an extremely
wealthy country where if you're really sick, you can go
to the doctor and the doctor's going to take good
care of you. So we have access to these resources
and privileges, and this life that we lead gives us
the illusion that we have control over our circumstances and
that we can create a life where we experience mostly happiness, pleasure,
(29:41):
and joy. And yet I believe, and I know Victor
Frankel believes that if you had a life where all
your circumstances were only happiness and you experienced no contrast,
you would actually never experience real joy, and you would
never experience true compassion, and you would never experience real love,
because those experiences come from going down into the depths
(30:05):
of difficulty. That's just where they're born from. You know.
Beautiful art is born from challenge. Love and compassion and
bonding is born from going through difficulty together with someone
and supporting one another. That's where love is born from,
is from seeing one another in our wholeness and not
(30:25):
just seeing the good parts of someone, but also seeing
the dark parts or the difficult parts of someone and
accepting them in their wholeness as they are. And so
without those aspects of life, without that contrast, we don't
even get happiness. Happiness is just sort of like a
airy fairy idea. It's just sort of like a surface
level thing that doesn't really exist. And so I think
(30:49):
this idea of our culture not supporting young families is
a parallel to what we believe about meaning in life,
what we believe about how life operates about, you know,
the rights that everyone has to sort of like their
own space and their own happiness and controlling their environment.
I was mentioning the feeling of going into a restaurant
(31:10):
or going into a mall with young kids and how
you get the side eye from a lot of people.
I always like watch people's faces because you can tell
people who have either had children, or people who are
grandparents of young children, or people who have been around
young kids will give you a look when your kids
are losing it or melting down in a restaurant or
(31:30):
in a mall. That's like a look of understanding. They're
like I've got you. You're good, You're doing a great job.
Sometimes they'll even come over and like put their hand
on your shoulder and say, like, great job, mama, you're
crushing it. But most people give you this kind of
look out of the side of their eye, like that
kid is crying. Get them out of my space. Immediately,
that kid is crying. It's bothering me. I can't hear myself, think,
(31:53):
I can't talk, and so you know, you need to
clear out of here, and it creates this really isolating experience,
says a young parent. This is not me complaining about
this at all. It's just me speaking to an aspect
of our culture that I would really like to be
part of reshaping or reshifting. And I think it's going
to take a shifting of our entire paradigm, not just
(32:15):
a shifting of you know, how people respond to in
a restaurant, but the paradigm that chaos, messiness, murkiness, confusion, noise,
whatever it is, it's all part of life, okay, It's
all part of what it means to be human and
what it means to be in existence. And our obsession
(32:37):
was sort of cleaning that up and making sure everyone's
experience is always perfect, and no one's inconvenienced, and no
one has to hear a noise that they don't want
to hear. That obsession that we have with controlling our
circumstances is blocking our happiness. I'm convinced of this. It's
in the way. And when we can remove the block
(32:59):
to happiness, we will begin to experience contrast, which will
mean being inconvenienced. You know, hearing a noise that you
don't want to hear, your experience not being like perfectly
curated in every kind of a way. And yet it
will open up parts of you that you didn't know
were there. It will expand you into someone that you
(33:19):
didn't know you could be. And when that space exists,
think of it like opening up a room in a house.
That space exists, and there's more room for more happiness,
more joy, more pleasure to just rush in. There's more
space without experiences of frustration, complication, chaos, inconvenience. We don't
(33:46):
have access to that space. And what we're doing when
we face a difficulty or we face a challenge with compassion,
with discipline, with character, When we show up and we
face a challenge and we say, I don't know what
to do. I don't know the solution here. I'm hurting,
I'm in pain, but I'm here anyway. I'm showing up.
My heart is open, I'm in my life with my
whole heart. When we show up and we do that anyway,
(34:08):
we are slowly but surely opening more space for joy,
opening more space for pleasure, opening more space for happiness.
And I think when we can really get that as
a culture, the feelings of like being in public and
being an inconvenience or a frustration will just automatically shift.
I think when we can really get that as a culture,
(34:29):
public spaces are just going to automatically shift, and they're
automatically going to have more space for not only young kids,
but also elderly people. You know, we live in a
culture that sort of like segregates elderly people to over there.
And I have felt this as a mom too, where
because you're in such a vulnerable position as a mom,
it's like, yeah, we don't really want to deal with that.
(34:51):
We don't want to deal with your breastfeeding or your
vulnerability at all, So why don't you just stay at
home during this vulnerable time of your life? And you
can rejoin society when you don't feel it's so vulnerable.
We are so terrified to experience vulnerability, to look at vulnerability,
to have vulnerability be a part of our lives. We're
almost like shoring it up and shutting it out of
(35:11):
our lives so that we don't even have to think
about it. We can just go about curating our experience,
making it perfect, making exactly how we want it to be.
And then when you know, as a mom, when you're
back on your feet, when you bounced back after your
postpartum time, then you can rejoin society as long as
your baby doesn't cry, and as long as you don't
have to breastfeed in public. It's just such an interesting
(35:32):
thing to me watching that reel. And again I've not
watched the entire interview, so I'm not making a judgment
about the real more about the comments and about this
idea that we have that we could curate perfect happiness
in our lives. I think it's a trap. I really
think it's a trap. I think it's a path that
you know there's no harm in walking down the path
to curating happiness. I think our life on planet Earth
(35:56):
will shatter that illusion eventually anyway. So if you are
walking down a path where you're hoping to curate perfect happiness,
I think you know you can have aspects of that
in your life and it's fine, and life is going
to show up and probably shatter that illusion at some
point along your journey anyway. So it's not like I
have to correct that or something. But I just want
to say, if you're someone who's listening to this who
(36:17):
has already experienced either motherhood and the way that that's
completely just demolished who you thought you were and it's
changed your life completely, if you're feeling sort of like
under the weight of that, or if you're up against
a totally different challenge and you're asking yourself like will
I ever be happy again? What I want you to
know is that your happiness that you can experience in
(36:39):
the future is in direct proportion to how you face
this challenge that's in front of you. This challenge that's
in front of you is opening up space. It's opening
up more space inside of you so that more joy,
more pleasure, more relief, more grace can eventually wash it.
I hope you find that encouraging. I hope you find
(37:00):
it inspiring. I hope it maybe slightly shifts the way
that you look at your life, rather than thinking how
can I accumulate the most happiness possible? How can I
face the difficulties in my life with great joy? I
hope it helps you, and I'll see you back next
week on the Write Your Story podcast
Pick up the pieces of your life, put them back
together with the words you write, all the beauty and
peace and the magic that you'll start too fun when
you write your story. You got the words and said,
don't you think it's down to let them out and
write them down on cold It's all about and write
(00:24):
your story. Write, write your story. Hi, and welcome back
to the Write Your Story Podcast. I'm Ali Fallon, I'm
your host, and on today's episode, I want to tackle
a pretty big topic. I want to talk about happiness.
But I want to talk about happiness as it relates
to what this podcast is really about, which is about
taking our agency and using it to shape our stories,
(00:47):
to quote unquote write our stories, even if we're not
literally writing a book and writing a story. I want
to talk about what it means to shape your story
as it relates to happiness. So what role does happiness
act play when it comes to shaping our stories? Are
we shaping our stories in such a way where happiness
is paramount or does happiness even matter for a meaningful story?
(01:10):
This is what I want to unpack today. And I
got inspired to talk about this topic because of something
that I saw on Instagram. I was just sort of
casually scrolling Instagram at the end of the day, as
I do sometimes to decompress after getting my kids to bed,
and I saw a reel that Adam Grant had posted.
Adam has, you know, almost three million followers. You may
(01:31):
already follow him, but he is an organizational psychologist. He's
an author who's written a really popular book. He has
actually written a couple of books, and he was interviewing
another psychologist and they were talking about happiness as it
relates to being a parent. So of course this caught
my attention because usually when I'm scrolling Instagram, it's because
I'm so exhausted from a day of chasing my two
(01:53):
young kids around that I just need something really mindless
and passive to do, so that's usually why I'm sc Instagram.
So this was me that night. I had just gotten
my kids to bed. It had been a really good
but a full, exhausting, tiring, long day. Then bedtime you
parents out there, No bedtime is always a struggle, no
matter how good the day has been. Like if you
(02:14):
have a great day, bedtime is horrible because the kids
don't want to go to bed because they're having so
much fun. And if you've had a really hard day,
bedtime is horrible because the kids are like completely melting
down and have lost all sense of calm in their
bodies and are just regulated and just you know, it's
just a nightmare and it kind of no matter how
you swing it. And my husband and I have gone
around the block over the years with bedtime. We used
(02:36):
to have these really long bedtimes that were like extremely frustrating,
and we would trade off. We would argue over, you know,
who is going to do bedtime tonight, and sort of
like barter with bedtime. It would be like, all do
the dishes for a month if you do bedtime tonight.
And then more recently we started working with a parent coach,
which is like a whole other episode I could talk
about that, but this parent coach helped us to do
(02:58):
a better job of setting boundaries with our kids, and
it was so incredible and amazing, and bedtimes became much
lighter and easier to handle. And yet still even with
the boundaries in place, even with our better bedtimes that
are no longer two hours long but that now are
like twenty minutes, even still bedtime is just sort of
a thing at the end of the day. So I
(03:18):
had just done this bedtime routine, I had just gotten
the two kids to sleep, I settled into my bed.
I'm scrolling Instagram, and all of a sudden, I'm watching
Adam Grant interview this other psychologist asking him questions about
parenting and happiness. And one of the things that I
heard this psychologist say that I guess you could say
was kind of triggering for me, was that you ask
(03:42):
parents if having children has made them happier, and they
will tell you yes, But when you actually look at
the data, the truth is having kids doesn't make you happier,
that happiness tends to improve when your kids are grown
and leave the house. And so I just saw the
short clip of the interview. I didn't watch the entire interview.
I still haven't watched the entire interview, but I was
(04:05):
just noticing how this conversation that the two of them
were having was feeling kind of triggering to me. And
I imagine this would be triggering for most parents, because
you have like such adoration and love, like an unspeakable,
unexplainable amount of love type of love, unconditional love for
your kids. They in every way that you can imagine
(04:25):
make your life better and richer and more incredible. And
so to hear someone say kids don't really make you
happier is a wild thing to hear someone say, and
you kind of want to I immediately went to the
comments because I was like, I want to see what
other people are saying about this. So this is what
we do on Instagram, right, we go straight to the comments.
We're like, am I crazy? Or are other people also
(04:46):
feeling this way about this content? And sure enough in
the comments, there's a lot of parents saying, you know,
I don't know about you, but my kids make me
infinitely happier. I'm happier now than I was before. And
then there are other people in the comments saying like,
why are all the parents here getting so defensive? So
it just got me thinking about the nuance of this
topic and of this idea of happiness. I want to
(05:08):
expand the topic of happiness beyond just having kids, because
this isn't really an episode. It's not a podcast about this,
and it's not an episode trying to convince someone who's
on the fence about having kids to have kids, or
someone who's chosen not to have kids to have kids,
or anything like that. I feel like, you know, if
you have decided that you do not want to have children,
then more power to you. Please don't have children, because
(05:30):
it will. You know, even even wanting kids, it has
rocked my world and challenged me in ways that I
couldn't have imagined, even like desperately for a decade, more
than a decade, like begging God to give me children.
Even still having kids has really surprised me with how
challenging and difficult it can be. So it's not about
convincing someone to do something that they don't otherwise want
(05:53):
to do. But I do want to talk about the
nuance of a word like happiness and talk about like,
is how happiness even really the goal? Because if you
have these two different perspectives, parents in the comments saying yeah, sure,
life has changed so much since I've had kids, and
I have less freedom, you know, I travel less and
(06:17):
I do less fun things with my friends, And yet
I would pick this a thousand times over. There has
to be something there. And it really got me thinking
about this idea even in my own personal experience, because yeah,
in certain ways, when you measure my life before kids
versus now with kids, in certain ways my life was
quote unquote better back then, and yet my life is richer, deeper,
(06:39):
more fulfilling, infinitely more like just full, just fun and
full and wonderful now than it was back then. And
yet I also am not denying that it's also exhausting,
and I'm not denying that it's also really frustrating, and
I'm also not denying that it's also confining. You know,
I miss probably more than anything else, maybe two things
(07:02):
I miss more than anything else from pre child life.
One is freedom, and that includes like spontaneity, because I
just don't have that in my life. I feel like
when I had one child, I had a little bit
of it still where Matt and I could kind of
pick up and just be like we're just going to
go out for the day and just you know, like
get the car seat and pack the diaper bag and
(07:23):
we're just going out for the day and she'll nap
on the go and no problems. And then when I
had two children, I really felt that sense of anchoring,
like you can't just pick up and go. There are
too many logistics, there's too much you have to bring.
It's too challenging, it's too complicated. It's not the same.
It doesn't have that same lightness and freedom that it
did back before we had children, and so I felt
(07:45):
that anchoring happen when I had my second child. So freedom.
And then the other piece of that is community. And
this is something that I really want to spend a
minute talking about on today's episode because I think it
plays a massive role in happiness. And I think our
culture does a really, really terrible job of facilitating community,
particularly for parents, and particularly for parents of young kids.
(08:09):
I think our culture does a terrible job of facilitating
community for young parents. And because of that, parenting in
particular motherhood, or if you're the primary caregiver of your children,
that can be an extremely isolating experience. And as I
was thinking about what makes people happy, why does happiness matter?
(08:30):
Why are we even talking about happiness the nuances of happiness,
I was thinking, gosh, like, that's a big piece of this,
a big piece of why I might say I feel
less happy at times now than I did before, Because
before having kids, I could facilitate my own community. I
could get out of my house and go to a
yoga studio, I could go to a church community, I
(08:52):
could go to an outing. I could go to a restaurant,
I could go to a bar, I could go meet people.
I could just go to a concert, a venue, go out,
walk around the town, go shopping, go to the mall,
whatever I wanted to do, and be in community with
other people. And then having children. And I'll get into
this later in the episode because I want to talk
(09:12):
about this as a kind of separate topic. But I
have felt as a mother the way that our culture
feels about mothers bringing young children into those spaces. I mean,
some of the spaces are just an automatic noe for kids,
like a bar, for example, but even a mall. If
you're a mother of young kids, I know you have
(09:34):
felt this where when you bring your young kids into
a space like a restaurant or a mall where other
people are there, you feel the sense that all eyes
are on you and they're expecting your kids to act
in a way that kids just don't know how to act.
And they're expecting your kids not to make noise or
not to bother them, or not to be an inconvenience,
or not to be too loud or whatever. And that
(09:57):
feeling that you have as a prime very parent is
extremely overwhelming. And makes you much less likely to come
and participate in those spaces. And so then motherhood or
parenthood becomes extremely isolating and that can play a role
in our happiness. So those two things, freedom and then community,
have been the two things that have been the biggest
(10:19):
adjustment for me coming into motherhood. And yeah, of course
those things would have an impact on happiness. So if
you're asking moms, you're asking dads, and I mean, I
know this can be a really different experience for moms
and dads too, depending on how the household is set up,
where sometimes moms have a whole different experience of motherhood
than dads do of fatherhood. For a lot of dads,
(10:39):
life goes on as normal after you have kids. You
still go to work, you still you know, you might
have small adjustments to make, But for a lot of
dads the adjustment is not as big as it is
for moms. And so it might depend on who you're asking.
Are you asking mom if her happiness or quality of
life has changed? Or are you asking dad if his
quality of life has changed? In our house, it's been
(11:00):
very fifty to fifty. Matt has at different points been
the quote primary parent or the stay at home parent
while I have continued on working, and at other points
I've been the state at home parent. Well, Matt has
continued on working, and we've kind of tag teamed those things.
And even you know, Matt and I have had a
lot of discussions about this because we're moving into a
season where he's stepping into more of the primary breadwinner
(11:23):
position and I'm stepping into more of the primary parent position.
And yet Matt, because he's been the primary parent and
he has the awareness of what it looks like to
be a primary parent, he also knows how to support
me without me having to say to him like, hey,
could you do this or could you do this? Matt
knows how to step in and support me as the
primary parent in ways that make my quality of life
(11:46):
a lot better. During the day when he's gone for
let's say eight hours, it's not always eight hours. Sometimes
it's ten and sometimes it's six, but he will do
things like make lunches ahead of time the night before,
or like prep the breakfast, or you know, get the
laundry moving, or or he comes home and he does bedtime.
Since I've been with the kids all day, so there
are things that he can do as the primary breadwinner
(12:07):
that helped to support me as the primary parent, and
he has an intuition about those things that he wouldn't
have otherwise had if we hadn't have traded off the
way that we have in our relationship. So again, I'm
just bringing this up to say, like, there are a
lot of things that impact the happiness of a parent,
and this is one of them. Anyway, I don't want
to spend this whole episode talking about the idea of
(12:28):
having kids or not having kids, but I bring this
up to say there are a lot of different things
that could impact how happy someone is as a parent,
and one of them could be how supportive their partner is.
How much does your partnership been in help with household
duties or do they see it as their responsibility or
are they waiting for you to kind of make them
a list and give them their honeydew list for what's
theirs to do? You know, do you have a partner
(12:49):
who travels all the time, that's another big stressor on
the parent who's home. So so many different nuances here
to why a parent might report that they were happier
before they had kids then after. But it's not really
the main thing I want to talk about. The main
thing I want to talk about is how are we
even defining happiness and what is it that really makes
(13:10):
us happy? Because I think that we have these cultural
ideas of what makes us happy, that we'll be happy
if we can get what we want, if we can
achieve what we want in our life, then we'll be happy.
And this is assuming that we even know what we want.
And as I was thinking about recording this episode, I
was thinking a lot about my dad, who, if you
(13:30):
have been listening for a while, you know, is no
longer with us. I lost my dad last October. My
dad and I would have very let's call them robust conversations, intense,
lovingly intense conversations about this topic because my dad was
cut from a little bit of a different cloth than me.
I mean, I think in a lot of ways we
were similar. But my dad's favorite book of all time
(13:52):
was M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. The first
sentence of that book I can recite from memory because
it's been recited to me so many times in my
forty one years of life, which is that life is difficult.
That's the first sentence of M. Scott pex The Road
Less Traveled, which was my dad's favorite book. Life is difficult,
And my dub would always say that life is difficult.
Life is difficult. Life is difficult, And I think as
(14:15):
a bit of a rebellion to that wanted my dad
to see, or wanted him to acknowledge, or wanted him
to accept that life could also be beautiful, and life
could be so full of you know, pleasure and joy,
and that you could have the things that you wanted
to have, and you could go out there and create
the reality that you were wanting to experience. And I
(14:39):
lived my life from that place of maybe sort of
trying to convince my dad or convince myself that this
other way of being was also possible. That you could
go out and you know, manifest the experiences that you
wanted to have, and you could travel everywhere and you
can meet these amazing people and you could experience pleasure
and joy and happiness. And yet the more life I've lived,
(14:59):
and the more you as I've been on this planet,
the more I realize that my dad and I were
both right. In other words, life is difficult, and also
there's so much pleasure to be found yes, life is difficult,
and also you can go create the things that you want. Yes,
we are the authors of our stories. We are the
creator of our own reality, our own existence. And also
(15:21):
part of how we experience meaning and joy in our
lives is through moving through the difficulty. If you think
about the write your story framework, even it's the problems
in the story that create the tension that transforms the hero.
(15:43):
The hero transforms because of difficulty, because of tension, and
without that tension, I've said a thousand times, the story
falls flat and it's just uninteresting. It doesn't really grip
us or engage us. And so yes, in some ways
my life life has become more challenging in many ways,
actually my life has become more challenging and difficult since
(16:04):
having children. And yet at the same time, when I
look back at my life pre children, especially by the
time that I had met Matt, I'd had a couple
of years of doing pretty much whatever I wanted, whenever
I wanted, with whoever I wanted. I'd had a few
years of traveling wherever I wanted to go, to really
beautiful locations, to you know, creating a life of pleasure
(16:26):
and ease and spontaneity and freedom and fun and people
and you know, having these incredible experiences, and I was
so happy. I had all the happiness that anyone could
ever ask for. I had privilege, I had money, There
was flow in my life. I was, you know, falling
in love with Matt. There were so many beautiful things
about my life at that time, and I wouldn't change
(16:48):
a single second of it. And yet when I look
at how my life has transformed since having kids, I
realized that the happiness that I had achieved back then
satisfies only to a certain extent. It is fun, and
it is satisfying, but only to It'd be like eating,
you know, the same meal over and over again for
(17:09):
the rest of your life, even if it's your favorite meal.
It's a delicious meal, but at some point you just go, yeah,
I'm interested in some contrast. I'm interested in something a
little bit different, and having kids for me has provided
that contrast. It's provided you know, even think about what
I said before about how having my second child kind
of anchored me. It created this necessity to sit still,
(17:31):
stay still, create routine, do the same thing every day,
which was in contrast to my life before, where I
was just flitting around from place to place all the time.
I mean, I never had any reason to be tied down.
I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. And
having children gave me this anchor that forced me to
experience contrast, and experiencing that contrast has taken me deeper.
(17:55):
It has changed who I am. It has made me
a better person. It's made me stronger. It's taught me
so many things about life and about how the world works.
It's shown me things I never would have been able
to see without the contrast. So yes, in certain ways,
surface level ways, having kids has made me less happy,
I guess, And yet it has also opened up my world,
(18:17):
expanded my world, expanded me to become someone new that
I never could have become without my children. Now. One
comment that I will often get if I post something
like that online, which I have before, talking about how
my kids have really challenged me and opened me and
expanded me and made me someone better, people will say, well,
(18:38):
can't you do that without having kids? Yes, of course,
there are so many experiences in life, but beyond having
kids that can also expand you. One experience that expanded
me in my life was travel. So travel also at
a time in my life, provided a contrast that I
hadn't experienced before. I grew up in a fairly altered environment.
(19:01):
I guess that's fair to say. I grew up in
the suburbs and in the church and in a small
community that was relatively safe and loving and just exactly
the kind of space that you would want your children
to grow up in. And yet I hadn't really traveled
many places or experienced the world until I was in
my twenties. And then I wanted to go to Europe,
(19:22):
and I wanted to go to China, and I wanted
to go, you know, see the world and travel all
over the place. And I did that, and it provided
me experiences that were in contrast to what I had
experienced before. It provided me experiences like going, you know,
an extra couple of hours without a meal, for example,
when you're traveling, you don't always have access to food
immediately right there. You don't always have access to the
(19:44):
food that you want to eat. There are so many
experiences in our lives that can provide us with that
contrast that don't have to be having children. It could
be travel for you, It could be an experience that
we would otherwise call negative, like maybe you're diagnosed with
a terminal illness or with a serious illness. When I
was in my mid twenties, I was told that I
had dietary fructose intolerance, which is an intolerance to the
(20:07):
sugar called fructose, which meant, according to my doctor, that
I could never eat fruit, never eat most vegetables, never
eat anything with high fructose corn syrup in it. And
I had to go on a long journey of first,
you know, cutting all those things out of my diet
and then sort of finding other health practitioners who could
help me figure out like what was really going on
with my body. And that whole journey was it pleasurable? No,
(20:31):
you know, I spent years eating like only five foods
that I could eat without my stomach hurting or without
like just being in severe pain or without feeling like
extremely lethargic. And that whole journey was extremely frustrating and
upsetting and felt unfair at times. And you know, I
went through my whole mental process with it. And yet
at the end of the day, it also was an
(20:52):
experience that helped me grow and helped me expand, and
helped me become the woman who I am today. So
if we're living our lives only sort of seeking happiness only,
sort of seeking the things that we know are going
to give us pleasure or make us happy. And this
is Victor Frankel's whole thing too, man search for meaning,
which is a lot of where this Write your Story
framework came from. This is Victor Frankele's whole message is
(21:16):
that what you are craving is not just pleasure. What
you are craving is not just happiness. What you are
craving is meaning. And a life that is rich in
meaning becomes a life that has the capacity to handle
pain and suffering with grace and with relative ease. A
(21:37):
life becomes a life that has the capacity to handle
frustration like a bedtime where your kids are not listening
to you and it takes you an hour to get
them to sleep. Your life has the capacity to hold
that because it also has so much meaning and so
much richness and so much love inside of it that
(21:58):
it just can hold all of that challenge and difficulty.
And I think the older I get, the more I
realized that my dad was really onto something with the
idea that life is difficult. You know, life serves you
up difficulties. The nuance I would bring to this conversation
that I didn't have to bring when I was in
my twenties sitting arguing with my dad about this is this,
(22:22):
You don't have to go out and stir up your
own difficulty in your life, because life will dish it
up for you every life, every person I've ever known,
no matter how privileged, no matter how wealthy, no matter
how insulated, no matter what, every human being who walks
the face of this planet, who lives a life, will
(22:42):
encounter difficulty. Now, the measure of difficulty you encounter may
be different depending on where on the planet you live,
depending on how many resources you have, depending on a
lot of different factors. But the level of difficulty that
you encounter also matches the level of the capacity you
(23:06):
have to expand and to grow. So the more we
insulate ourselves from difficulty, the more we limit our own expansion.
Difficulty is inevitable, and I do agree with M. Scott
Peck and with my dad that life is full of difficulty.
Difficulty is going to be dished up to you on
a silver platter at many different times in your life.
And it's going to come in a bunch of different packages,
(23:28):
and it's going to look a bunch of different ways.
The factor of how happy, truly happy you are in
your life is not a matter of how little difficulty
you can receive. It's a matter of how you respond
to the difficulty. So this isn't really a conversation about
kids or no kids. Again, this is not an issue
where I'm like trying to convince anyone to have kids
(23:49):
who doesn't want to have kids, or anything like that.
It was just an experience I had as I was
sitting there in my bed after the difficulty of getting
my kids to go to sleep, watching this reel that's
talking about how parents are less happy than those who
either choose never to have kids or those whose kids
have launched into the world, that that's when happiness spikes.
That I just thought, what a sort of pointless conversation
(24:12):
about who's happier people who have kids or people who
don't have kids, Because you know, if we're talking about kids,
that's one thing for the most part. Yet you have
a choice about whether you want to have kids or not,
or most of us do. In the modern world, we
have access to resources like birth control that can help
us to make those choices whether or not we want
to have kids. And yet there are so many instances
(24:34):
in life where things happen to us that we do
not have control over that could impact our quote unquote happiness.
You know, is someone happier with cancer or without cancer.
Is someone happier, you know, with ailing parents or without
ailing parents? Is someone happier in a happy relationship or
in a tense relationship. And yet there are things in
(24:55):
our lives that we just don't have control over. We
don't have control over who our parents are, We don't
have control over whether or not we get an illness.
So if we're waiting for life to be in the
perfect set of circumstances so that we can experience happiness,
we will be waiting a really, really long time. And
if instead we're able to see our lives through the
lens of life, is going to dish up lots of
(25:16):
difficulty to me. And you know what, the joy is
found in creating the capacity to hold the difficulty. Whatever
the difficulty is, whatever package it comes in, however it
shows up in my life, whether it's because of my children,
whether it's because of my health, whether it's because of
my relationships, whether it's because of my job, whether it's
because of my finances, whatever it is, however the difficulty
(25:38):
shows up, my joy in life is not dependent on
those circumstances, but it's dependent on how I choose to
see the difficulty. Can I hold the difficulty? Can I
receive it? Can I receive what's trying to show me,
what it's trying to teach me? Can I become the
kind of hero who transforms enough to transcend the difficulty
(26:01):
on the other side of it? And in order to
become that type of person, I may need to be
someone who faces difficulty every single day with grace and
compassion in my life. I may need to be become
someone who faces difficulty every single day with truth in
my life. And I can speak from experience having two
(26:21):
young kids that having kids at three and four and
every age before. I can't speak to older kids because
I haven't had older kids yet, but having kids at
every age leading up to three and four has added
tremendous complication, chaos, noise, difficulty, challenge to my life. And
(26:43):
it's a challenge that I would never trade for a
million years. It has made me infinitely happier. It has
made me so much stronger, It has made me a
better person on all fronts. It has changed me from
the inside out. I'm a completely different person now than
I was before having children. And it doesn't have to
(27:05):
be children. But whatever difficulty you are facing, maybe the
conversation shouldn't be how do we avoid this difficulty? But
maybe it should be how do I face the difficulty
with discipline? How do I face the difficulty with compassion?
How do I face the difficulty with softness? How do
I fully receive what my life is trying to offer
me through this difficulty? Maybe it shouldn't be about how
(27:28):
do we avoid the pain? How do I avoid the heartbreak?
How do I live a life where I never have
to face anything challenging or difficult, where I never have
to experience that contrast, where I never have to do
anything I don't want to do. That's one way we
could live our life, or we could live our life
through the lens of life is going to dish me
up lots of difficulty. What am I going to do
with it? How am I going to show up in
(27:50):
light of the difficulty? How am I going to allow
my character to develop inside of this difficulty. And again,
as Victor frankl would say, it's not happiness that you're
looking for, it's not happiness that you're craving. It's meaning
that you're craving. And meaning comes through facing the difficulty
in our life with an open heart, with an open mind,
(28:13):
with an open spirit, receiving what the difficulty is here
to show us. I said, I would circle back to
this later in the episode, and I do want to
spend a minute talking about how our culture avoids supporting
(28:33):
parents and young families, because I think there's a parallel
here to how our culture sees happiness versus meaning. I
think as a culture, we trend toward the idea that
if I can just control my circumstances, I can be happy,
I won't ever have to face difficulty, and I'm going
to live a great life. I think as a culture,
we have just sort of bought in to that narrative.
(28:56):
And like I mentioned in last week's episode, we have
the privilege of buying into this narrative because we live
in a culture where, for the most part, we have
been insulated from extreme difficulty. We haven't had wars that
are fought on our soil. In my lifetime, we are
a very wealthy country where there are a lot of
broken aspects to healthcare and other part you know, politics
(29:19):
and whatever else. And yet we live in an extremely
wealthy country where if you're really sick, you can go
to the doctor and the doctor's going to take good
care of you. So we have access to these resources
and privileges, and this life that we lead gives us
the illusion that we have control over our circumstances and
that we can create a life where we experience mostly happiness, pleasure,
(29:41):
and joy. And yet I believe, and I know Victor
Frankel believes that if you had a life where all
your circumstances were only happiness and you experienced no contrast,
you would actually never experience real joy, and you would
never experience true compassion, and you would never experience real love,
because those experiences come from going down into the depths
(30:05):
of difficulty. That's just where they're born from. You know.
Beautiful art is born from challenge. Love and compassion and
bonding is born from going through difficulty together with someone
and supporting one another. That's where love is born from,
is from seeing one another in our wholeness and not
(30:25):
just seeing the good parts of someone, but also seeing
the dark parts or the difficult parts of someone and
accepting them in their wholeness as they are. And so
without those aspects of life, without that contrast, we don't
even get happiness. Happiness is just sort of like a
airy fairy idea. It's just sort of like a surface
level thing that doesn't really exist. And so I think
(30:49):
this idea of our culture not supporting young families is
a parallel to what we believe about meaning in life,
what we believe about how life operates about, you know,
the rights that everyone has to sort of like their
own space and their own happiness and controlling their environment.
I was mentioning the feeling of going into a restaurant
(31:10):
or going into a mall with young kids and how
you get the side eye from a lot of people.
I always like watch people's faces because you can tell
people who have either had children, or people who are
grandparents of young children, or people who have been around
young kids will give you a look when your kids
are losing it or melting down in a restaurant or
(31:30):
in a mall. That's like a look of understanding. They're
like I've got you. You're good, You're doing a great job.
Sometimes they'll even come over and like put their hand
on your shoulder and say, like, great job, mama, you're
crushing it. But most people give you this kind of
look out of the side of their eye, like that
kid is crying. Get them out of my space. Immediately,
that kid is crying. It's bothering me. I can't hear myself, think,
(31:53):
I can't talk, and so you know, you need to
clear out of here, and it creates this really isolating experience,
says a young parent. This is not me complaining about
this at all. It's just me speaking to an aspect
of our culture that I would really like to be
part of reshaping or reshifting. And I think it's going
to take a shifting of our entire paradigm, not just
(32:15):
a shifting of you know, how people respond to in
a restaurant, but the paradigm that chaos, messiness, murkiness, confusion, noise,
whatever it is, it's all part of life, okay, It's
all part of what it means to be human and
what it means to be in existence. And our obsession
(32:37):
was sort of cleaning that up and making sure everyone's
experience is always perfect, and no one's inconvenienced, and no
one has to hear a noise that they don't want
to hear. That obsession that we have with controlling our
circumstances is blocking our happiness. I'm convinced of this. It's
in the way. And when we can remove the block
(32:59):
to happiness, we will begin to experience contrast, which will
mean being inconvenienced. You know, hearing a noise that you
don't want to hear, your experience not being like perfectly
curated in every kind of a way. And yet it
will open up parts of you that you didn't know
were there. It will expand you into someone that you
(33:19):
didn't know you could be. And when that space exists,
think of it like opening up a room in a house.
That space exists, and there's more room for more happiness,
more joy, more pleasure to just rush in. There's more
space without experiences of frustration, complication, chaos, inconvenience. We don't
(33:46):
have access to that space. And what we're doing when
we face a difficulty or we face a challenge with compassion,
with discipline, with character, When we show up and we
face a challenge and we say, I don't know what
to do. I don't know the solution here. I'm hurting,
I'm in pain, but I'm here anyway. I'm showing up.
My heart is open, I'm in my life with my
whole heart. When we show up and we do that anyway,
(34:08):
we are slowly but surely opening more space for joy,
opening more space for pleasure, opening more space for happiness.
And I think when we can really get that as
a culture, the feelings of like being in public and
being an inconvenience or a frustration will just automatically shift.
I think when we can really get that as a culture,
(34:29):
public spaces are just going to automatically shift, and they're
automatically going to have more space for not only young kids,
but also elderly people. You know, we live in a
culture that sort of like segregates elderly people to over there.
And I have felt this as a mom too, where
because you're in such a vulnerable position as a mom,
it's like, yeah, we don't really want to deal with that.
(34:51):
We don't want to deal with your breastfeeding or your
vulnerability at all, So why don't you just stay at
home during this vulnerable time of your life? And you
can rejoin society when you don't feel it's so vulnerable.
We are so terrified to experience vulnerability, to look at vulnerability,
to have vulnerability be a part of our lives. We're
almost like shoring it up and shutting it out of
(35:11):
our lives so that we don't even have to think
about it. We can just go about curating our experience,
making it perfect, making exactly how we want it to be.
And then when you know, as a mom, when you're
back on your feet, when you bounced back after your
postpartum time, then you can rejoin society as long as
your baby doesn't cry, and as long as you don't
have to breastfeed in public. It's just such an interesting
(35:32):
thing to me watching that reel. And again I've not
watched the entire interview, so I'm not making a judgment
about the real more about the comments and about this
idea that we have that we could curate perfect happiness
in our lives. I think it's a trap. I really
think it's a trap. I think it's a path that
you know there's no harm in walking down the path
to curating happiness. I think our life on planet Earth
(35:56):
will shatter that illusion eventually anyway. So if you are
walking down a path where you're hoping to curate perfect happiness,
I think you know you can have aspects of that
in your life and it's fine, and life is going
to show up and probably shatter that illusion at some
point along your journey anyway. So it's not like I
have to correct that or something. But I just want
to say, if you're someone who's listening to this who
(36:17):
has already experienced either motherhood and the way that that's
completely just demolished who you thought you were and it's
changed your life completely, if you're feeling sort of like
under the weight of that, or if you're up against
a totally different challenge and you're asking yourself like will
I ever be happy again? What I want you to
know is that your happiness that you can experience in
(36:39):
the future is in direct proportion to how you face
this challenge that's in front of you. This challenge that's
in front of you is opening up space. It's opening
up more space inside of you so that more joy,
more pleasure, more relief, more grace can eventually wash it.
I hope you find that encouraging. I hope you find
(37:00):
it inspiring. I hope it maybe slightly shifts the way
that you look at your life, rather than thinking how
can I accumulate the most happiness possible? How can I
face the difficulties in my life with great joy? I
hope it helps you, and I'll see you back next
week on the Write Your Story podcast
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.