Timely lessons from the book: "The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary"

When your brain keeps moving the happiness goalposts (and how to deal with it)

You can be unhappy chasing the next big thing (goal, target, etc.), or you can choose to find joy in ordinary things and life—that’s a big promise of the relatively short book we will be discussing today. But first, let me explain why I circled to this particular book.

I made a tiny observation in the recent month. Whenever I achieve a great milestone, it's the number of subscribers, a Note has done particularly well, readers gave me heart or comments, and it’s followed by “What’s next?” 

It was painful to reach 600 subscribers, yet once I did, I started eyeing the 700. I set goals, and the goalposts kept changing. Soon enough, I started to get a bit annoyed with myself: ‘Why can’t you just be happy for a few days and enjoy what you accomplished, instead of filling your mind with the next targets?’

I got really annoyed with myself (for asking so much of myself all the freaking time). What’s the rush? Why can’t you just enjoy the moment as it is?

The more I thought about it, the more annoyed (with myself) I got because I realised the issue was me, what’s going on in my mind, and how I think about things. Then I realised that things could be worse if the problem was not me because it’s harder to get to grips with this spinning cycle if it’s a hundred per cent out of your control. 

As you know, when I don’t have the answers to a problem that’s pinning me to the wall, I turn to books and research. For this particular problem, I heavily relied on Catherine Gray's The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary. 

The message of this book is loud and clear—the unexpected joy of the ordinary.

Even if this is the only part that you’ll remember and take away, it’s powerful enough.

I desperately wanted this book to solve all my problems. I see now this was unrealistic, but it served as a good starting point.

What comes next is what I picked up to shift my mindset and express gratitude for what is here and now. Some worked, some did not.

You achieve a big milestone; the number finally flips from 599 to 600. It’s a big deal.  Your brain floods with sweet dopamine... for about 48 hours. Then, like clockwork, you're back to drafts, wondering why that big win suddenly feels... ordinary.

If this sounds familiar (without knowing), you might be part of the club of perpetual strivers, where the finish line keeps moving just as we're about to cross it.

Your brain isn't broken. (I can’t guarantee the same about my brain). After snooping around, it turns out it's just doing what evolution programmed it to do. Psychologists call it the "hedonic treadmill" - a term for our frustrating tendency to chase the next dopamine hit, no matter how many goals we accomplish or how many boxes we tick off our achievement list.

Think of it like your phone's appearance setting automatically adjusting to day/night time. According to scientists, our brains do the same thing with happiness, constantly recalibrating until what felt amazing yesterday becomes the new normal today. 

As Catherine Gray writes in The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary: “Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense that our brain automatically scans the horizon for potential peril. 'Survival of the negative' is more accurate than 'survival of the fittest'. There's no use in being able to run like an Olympian if you haven't spotted the thing you need to run from.

By homing in on what is wrong with the picture rather than what is right with it, our brains are simply trying to save our skins should calamity strike. It's just that now, we no longer live in landscapes where wolves, a rival tribe, highway henchmen or the plague threaten to eradicate us. There are threats, for sure, but if you live in the first world, you're generally pretty safe.

And yet, our brains have hung onto this ancient hardwiring, which means we survey rush hour with the same threat level as our ancestors would have appraised a genuinely dangerous situation.”

These days, it’s about as helpful as a late-night coffee when you need to get to bed.

Why your brain is ruining your happy moments 

The science behind this is actually pretty wild. Research shows that whether you're a lottery winner or someone who just scored a 10% raise, your happiness levels will likely bounce back to their baseline within months. It's like your brain has an emotional thermostat, always trying to regulate back to room temperature.

And no, this isn't because you're "ungrateful" or "never satisfied." It's literally your brain doing its job - so stop feeling guilty about it. Yet, when did saying “stop” ever work as the proper remedy? 

Stepping off the treadmill by embracing the ordinary, even if it sounds boring.The ordinary is relative and subjective. As Gray writes, the novelty isn't about doing extraordinary things — it's about noticing extraordinary details in ordinary moments. The research throughout this book is impactable; Gray provides suggestions and tweaks we can try out, drawing from the research she conducted and tested herself.

“The hedonic treadmill can be overridden”, says Professor Lyubomirsky at the University of California based on the study and tests she conducted with her students. 

“We instructed our participants to do several acts of kindness each week for ten weeks. Some were asked to mix their acts of kindness up, while others were requested to do the same thing at a similar time. The only ones who got happier were those who varied their generosities.”

Altering your set point of happiness through actual activity seems to do the trick.

“People often mistakenly think that you just ‘choose’ to be happy. But that’s not how it works. You have to choose things that make you happy,” says Dr. Korb.

So, the conclusion Gray presents is that happiness is an activity. 

We’ve been trained to search for milestones and deliverables. It’s how the job success is portrayed, through the annual reviews and your assessment of how close you were able to reach the targets set at the start of the year. That distance assessed your performance, your yearly success and the reward you can expect, depending on how ‘well’ you did. 

However, research shows that people who enjoy the process rather than obsess over outcomes report higher levels of happiness. Gray goes a long way in including the research into happiness and gratitude, primarily relying on Professor Lyubomirsky from the University of California and neuroscientist Dr. Korb. 

Gray suggests that “gratitude could alternatively be called ‘ordinary joys’, and as journalists, she prefers to focus on the ‘specifics’, so instead of listing macro gratitudes,” she suggests creating ‘micro ordinary joys’. These are little joys that happened during the day that warm up your heart, but you don’t even think to reflect back on them.

Here are a couple of examples from the book:

“Today, I lay reading on the sofa, wearing just my pants, listening to Alabama Shakes, and drinking fresh mint tea, which was like a garden party in my mouth. Was nice.”

“Today a very macho male friend told me that, sometimes, he pretends he’s stretching against a tree, and when nobody’s looking, he gives it a quick cuddle. It makes me snort every time I think of it.”

What micro-ordinary joys happened to you today?

“I get so busy sometimes chasing the extraordinary moments that I don’t pay attention to the ordinary moments. The moments that, if taken away, I would miss more than anything.” –Brene Brown

I must admit, even during and after reading this book, whenever someone mentions gratitude practice, I can’t help but roll my eyes. Often, it’s because  I don’t believe that it’s that simple. Life events, whatever they might be for you, are not black and white. There’s so much grey-ish area in what we experience in day-to-day life that simple advice such as: “Just be grateful for what you have” does not do it. 

As an outcome of reading The Unexpected Joys of Ordinary, flipping the focus from extraordinary to ordinary can make a huge difference. 

As I said, it most definitely won’t solve all your problems, and it’s not by any means ‘a secret to lasting happiness.’ It’ll merely highlight the ordinary moments that make up most of our days and might make you feel that much happier.

The goal isn't to stop growing or improving. It's about finding contentment in the here and now, in things and life as they are. 

The Unexpected Joys of Ordinary is split into three sections: The pursuit of the extraordinary, Ordinary living and Ordinary being, Ordinary loving, Ordinary learning, Ordinary brains and downtime, Ordinary bodies and conclusion. Gray offers a change in perspective to a great deal of daily struggles, so I am confident you’d find the section you need. This is a light, at times amusing read, I highly recommend it.