An essay on gratitude journals, government surveys, the old Castle Market, and the difference between chasing a feeling and keeping appointments with the things that produce it.
Nobody in our house ever said the word happy. My grandad kept a whole weather system for states of mind — chuffed, middling, nowt wrong wi’ me — but happiness itself stayed in its wrapper, like the good biscuits saved for visitors. Then, in my late twenties, the happiness industry caught up with me: gratitude journals, mood apps that wanted my evenings scored out of ten, paperbacks promising joy in twenty-one easy days. For about a year I chased happiness the way a dog chases a bus — total commitment, and no plan at all for the moment it stopped.
This essay is about how I stopped chasing, and what I found instead. Because in the Sheffield I grew up in — terraced streets, Saturday markets, the Pennine edge an easy bus ride away — happiness was never a destination. It was a byproduct: of company, of competence, of small repeated rituals like the brew, the walk, and the stall you always stopped at. The pursuit, it turned out, was getting in the way of the producing.
The year I audited my own life
The chase ended, as these things often do, with a spreadsheet. I was twenty-six, back in Sheffield after a few years away, and reading a lot of books with covers the colour of smoothies — positive psychology dressed for the beach. I did it properly, the way we do anything we’re unsure about: I built a system. A gratitude journal — three good things every night, in a notebook bought off the market. An app that buzzed at nine o’clock to ask how I felt, offering a row of faces from grim to beatific. And the spreadsheet, because by then I had lost all self-awareness, colour-coded, so that a good Tuesday showed green and one bad Sunday showed, in my own hand, grey.
The first thing to go wrong was the toast. Three nights running I wrote down toast, because it was the evening’s clearest success, and by the third entry I felt like a man committing expense claims. The second thing was subtler. Good hours became material. A pint with an old mate turned into copy. A walk up to Stanage turned into data. The app wanted the day summarised before the day had finished having its say.
In 2011, the psychologist Iris Mauss and her colleagues published research that rhymed with my grey Sunday. People who placed the highest value on happiness — who treated it as a goal to be reached — reported feeling lonelier, and in situations that should have pleased them, felt measurably worse. Correlation isn’t causation, and one man’s notebook is nobody’s evidence. Still. I had a spreadsheet that proved it, in colour.
What the government asks when it asks if you’re happy
When the state measures happiness, it asks four questions. Since 2011, the Office for National Statistics, under the well-being programme launched by David Cameron’s government in 2010, has asked adults across the country to rate — each on a scale of nought to ten — how satisfied they are with their life nowadays, whether the things they do are worthwhile, how happy they were yesterday, and how anxious they were yesterday. That last one runs backwards: the lower, the better. Which tells you something about the honesty of the enterprise.
I used to imagine my grandad fielding those questions. Satisfied with your life nowadays? “Well, I’ve allus done a day’s work.” Worthwhile? “Ask t’wife.” Anxious yesterday? “It were black over Bill’s mother’s, so we didn’t go far” — that’s storm cloud coming over the Pennines, from the direction of Bill’s mother. He’d have treated the surveyor to a brew and given away nothing a statistic could hold.
There’s a whole world of this now. The World Happiness Report ranks countries every spring — Finland, year after year, the teacher’s pet — and Bhutan has been counting Gross National Happiness since the 1970s, which sounds exotic until you notice that what it’s really counting is whether the fabric of ordinary life is holding. I’ve come round to thinking the ONS asks decent questions on the wrong scale. Nought to ten can’t hear the answer nowt wrong wi’ me, which contains, in five syllables, an entire philosophy: not the pursuit of feeling but the absence of complaint, held up for inspection like a clean plate.
Lessons from Castle Market
The best instruction in contentment I ever had was a Saturday morning at Castle Market — the concrete one, all neon and noise, before the council shut it in 2013 and the traders moved down to the Moor. My mum could make the trip last two hours without buying anything that needed two hours. The fish queue alone was a civic institution. You did not buy fish quickly in Sheffield, because the fish stall was a parliament and the cod was only the pretext.
The greeting comes before the goods
Now then was a complete sentence. Owt for nowt? was not a question about offers; it was a question about the state of the world, answerable with a shrug that meant same as ever, mustn’t grumble. Anthropologists have a word for patterned words that renew a bond each time they’re spoken — they call it ritual, and the market ran on it. Being seen by the same faces at the same stalls every week wasn’t a transaction cost. It was the product. I couldn’t have named the produce of half the stalls, but I knew the men behind them, and they knew me, and on a Saturday morning that was worth more than whatever was in the bag.
Competence is quiet joy
There was a stall that sold, as far as I could ever tell, nothing but buttons, zips, and ribbon. One man, decades deep in his own stock, who could find you the button for a coat whose spare you’d lost in 1987. Watching him work — the dip into the right drawer without looking — taught me something the mood app never managed: being good at a small thing, in public, for years, is a form of contentment you don’t have to chase, because it’s already in the room.
Then the closure. The Moor Market is a decent hall, and the traders worked hard to carry the ritual across, and rituals don’t take straight away; they take about a decade. The ONS kept asking its four questions right through those years, and I notice that not one of them was how much do you miss the place where your Saturdays happened? That’s my quarrel with the measuring, not the asking. Some of what makes a life feel fine is a building that smells of fish and hot bread, and there is no box for that on the form.
The hedonic treadmill and my dad’s shed
Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill; my dad’s shed had solved it decades earlier. Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell named the effect in the early seventies: we adapt. The new kettle, the promotion, the sun holiday — each lifts the graph for a while, then the graph remembers itself, and the chase restarts with the next purchase. Whatever level of happiness you’re built for, you treadmill back to it.
The shed was the one room in the house where nothing was getting better, and that was the point. A vice bolted to a bench older than me. Jars of screws sorted by a system that would not survive inspection. A radio tuned, seemingly permanently, to whoever Sheffield United were playing, so that the emotional range of the shed ran from resignation to something briefly brighter, usually around April. He never finished anything in there and never seemed to mind. It was anti-hedonic architecture: a place where nothing improved and nothing needed to, where the pleasure was in the constancy, not the trajectory.
I’m wary of romanticising. Sheds can be hiding places. Markets close. Routine can calcify into something you only call contentment because you’ve stopped asking. I’ve seen the treadmill’s mirror image too — people who stayed so still the moss grew over the plans. The shed worked because someone was always in and out of it, asking if he wanted a brew. The market worked because it was shared. Constancy plus company: as far as I can tell, that’s the whole formula, and neither half shows up on a mood app.
Same with the walk. Up Burbage, or along Stanage on a day the cloud has come down to meet you, flask of tea gone cold by the time you want it, half-carved millstones lying about the hillside where their makers gave up centuries back — a whole moor of abandoned projects, and it cheers me every time. We came down once in properly filthy weather and my dad delivered his verdict on the day like a man returning a borrowed tool: “Well. It were reyt.” Not happy. Reyt. A word with the expectation built in.
What I keep instead of a chase
These days I don’t chase happiness; I keep appointments with things that reliably produce it sideways, and I try not to look directly at them. A short list:
- The brew. Not tea as wellness — tea as punctuation. The kettle going on marks the end of one thing and the start of another, and half the calm is just the waiting.
- The market, still. Saturday morning, the Moor, fish if the queue’s short that day, and the bottle of Henderson’s back on the table at home — a sauce that never left South Yorkshire and never needed to.
- A walk with weather in it. Up to the edge and back, whatever the sky is doing. The forecast is consulted for clothing, never for permission.
- One repair or one making. Sharpening the knife, oiling the bike chain, bread on a Sunday. Aristotle had a word, eudaimonia, usually translated as flourishing, which sounds like a greenhouse operation but seems to have meant something plainer: the good day you can’t get by aiming at it, only by having done something.
- Company on a schedule. A standing monthly pint with the same three faces, no agenda. The market principle in a smaller hall: the greeting is the goods.
None of this is exotic — that’s rather the thesis. There’s a movement called Action for Happiness, founded in London in 2010 by the economist Richard Layard and others, which runs courses and calendars of small kind acts. Part of me warms to it; part of me hears my grandad asking why a happiness should need a committee. But their instincts and Castle Market’s were the same: feelings arrive as the exhaust of doing. The market just never charged for the course.
FAQ: happiness, contentment, and the pursuit of neither
Is it wrong to want to be happy?
No. Wanting it is human; aiming straight at it is where the trouble starts. Research by Iris Mauss and colleagues found that people who valued happiness most intensely tended to enjoy good moments less and to feel lonelier, and the sleep analogy holds: feeling, like sleep, retreats when stared at. Aim instead at activities — company, a walk, work of the hands — and let the feeling arrive uninvited, which is its preferred method.
What is the difference between happiness and contentment?
Happiness is weather; contentment is climate. Psychologists separate high-arousal pleasure — the spikes — from low-arousal states like contentment, which last longer and attach to routine, place, and people rather than to events. My grandad’s vocabulary knew the difference without the journals. Chuffed was for weather. Getting on was for climate.
How does the UK government measure happiness?
Since 2011 the Office for National Statistics has asked four questions, each scored nought to ten: overall life satisfaction, whether the things you do are worthwhile, how happy you were yesterday, and how anxious you were yesterday. The last is reverse-scored. They’re decent questions on an awkward scale — good at charting the nation’s moods, silent about what filled the days that produced them.
What can I do this week without buying anything?
Four swaps. Trade writing three good things for noticing three — no journal, no witnesses. Book one standing appointment with a place: a market, a stretch of hill, a particular chair. Do one small repair with your hands, however badly. Have one conversation with someone who isn’t expecting it — the queue counts. Then don’t check whether it worked. That’s the hard part.
A word for it
While writing this I’ve been asking people what their families called it — the feeling beneath happiness, the one you notice mostly by its absence. The answers are better than any survey. Chuffed, obviously. Made up. Reyt. Fair to middling, which concedes ground to the bad days while quietly holding the line. Mustn’t grumble — a whole philosophy with a shrug built into it. A woman at the Moor Market told me her dad called it being settled, and I’ve been thinking about that word all winter.
Sheffield keeps a whole drawer of such words — nesh for feeling the cold, snap for your lunch, gennel for the alley that gets you home — and I suspect the words we were handed for the feeling are more accurate than the industry’s. So I’m starting a running column, working title The Vocabulary of Contentment, and I’d like to hear yours: the word from your house, your street, your nan. Send it in. I’ll write up the best, with proper credit, over the new year.
Meanwhile, the kettle’s on. That’s the whole secret, most days: not the feeling you were chasing, just the water coming to a boil — and somebody to tell that it has.