I think I'm happier today than I've ever been in my adult life. Which is a strange thing to say, given what it took to get here.
Four years ago my life looked very different. I was married, with two children, a home, a house full of possessions and a reasonably settled idea of who I was. All the things that, from the outside, add up to a successful adult life.
Then, in a fairly short space of time, most of it disappeared.
Not in the LinkedIn sense, where someone loses a client and announces they've been on a profound journey of personal transformation. Actually disappeared.
A highly confrontational divorce. Separation from my children. Living in a country without my family around me, and without a circle of friends to fall back on. Most of my possessions gone. The life I'd spent years building looking as though someone had taken a sledgehammer to it.
Not quite the five-year plan.
And yet I think that period changed how I understand happiness more than anything before it. Not because suffering is good for you. That's the sort of thing people say when they're not the ones doing the suffering. It's because when you lose most of what defined you, you're left with an uncomfortable question.
Who the hell are you without any of it?
The great involuntary reset
There's a whole industry built on reinventing yourself. Books, podcasts, retreats, life coaches, people charging extraordinary sums to help you find your authentic self, ideally somewhere in Bali with an infinity pool. All you need to do, apparently, is step outside your comfort zone.
There's another way. Have life remove your comfort zone entirely.
No booking required.
When my marriage ended, it wasn't just the end of a relationship. It was the dismantling of a whole life: the routines, the familiarity, the things you own, the people you see, the role you play in your family. All the small, unremarkable things that together make you feel anchored somewhere.
The hardest part by far was being separated from my children.
There isn't a clever way to describe that. You can fill your days with work, the gym and the general machinery of adult life, and none of it changes the fact that you're missing moments you won't get back. Birthdays. Bedtimes. Ordinary afternoons. The little things that turn out not to be little at all once you're no longer there for them.
The divorce was confrontational, and the children were affected by it. I'm not going to dress that up as a useful life lesson. Some things are just painful.
But alongside the pain came something I hadn't expected. For the first time in a very long while, I had the chance to rebuild my life almost from scratch. ("Chance" is doing some heroic work in that sentence.) There was no familiar environment telling me who I was supposed to be, no social circle reinforcing the person I'd always been, no routines kept going simply because they'd always been there.
Just me. Which turns out to be quite a confronting person to be left alone with.
The exhausting business of being somebody
I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about my younger self, and I've reached an uncomfortable conclusion. For much of my life, I was driven by ego.
Not the look-at-my-Lamborghini kind, although I'm sure I had my moments. The quieter, socially acceptable kind that a lot of ambitious people have. I wanted to be successful, respected, seen as someone who'd made something of himself. The career, the money, the lifestyle, the right impression.
Underneath it was a need for validation I barely noticed. From family, friends and colleagues, and occasionally from people whose opinions had no bearing on my life whatsoever. It's remarkable how much energy you can spend trying to impress people you don't particularly like.
I didn't see it at the time. When you're young, ambitious and reasonably good at what you do, chasing success feels perfectly rational. You work hard, earn more, collect the symbols of progress and assume happiness will turn up as part of the package, ideally with a decent pension and business-class upgrades.
The problem with building your identity around how other people see you is that you've outsourced your self-worth. And the people you've outsourced it to haven't got a fucking clue what they're doing either.
Somewhere in the last two or three years, that changed. I stopped caring quite so much. Not about people, or about being decent and doing the right thing. About the performance. The need to be seen a certain way, to keep up an image, to live a particular kind of life because that's what successful people are supposed to do.
What I found was that most people aren't thinking about you nearly as much as you imagine. They're far too busy worrying about what everyone else thinks of them. Which is an absurd arrangement when you stop and look at it.
Somewhere between the divorce and the squat rack
One of the more unexpected things to come out of that period was my health. Or rather, what happened when I finally took it seriously.
For most of my adult life, fitness was something I'd get round to. You know the routine. Work hard, travel, eat whatever's convenient, exercise when there's time, and promise yourself you'll get back in shape once things settle down. Things never settle down.
After the separation, the gym became something else. At first it was an outlet for the frustration, the stress, the loneliness and the enormous amount of mental noise that comes with having your life turned upside down. It also filled a gap. Time that would have been spent with my children needed somewhere to go, and rather than let it all disappear into work or worse, I started putting it into myself.
Then I noticed that getting stronger wasn't just changing how I looked. It was changing how I thought. When I train consistently, I eat better. When I eat better, I sleep better. When I sleep better, I think more clearly, and I'm a considerably less irritating version of myself. That's the theory, anyway.
It stopped being about exercise and became a set of habits that held each other up. Getting up early. Training. Eating properly. Going to bed at a sensible hour. Being deliberate about how I spend the day.
I'm not convinced the people who get up at five to lift heavy things are entirely right in the head. You need a certain level of madness to turn down a perfectly good evening because you've decided that pre-dawn deadlifts are a sensible lifestyle choice.
But I find that discipline deeply satisfying. Nobody makes you do it. Nobody pays you to turn up. There's no performance review and no corporate wellbeing initiative led by a suspiciously enthusiastic person from HR. You either show up or you don't, and the consequences are entirely yours.
At a time when so much of my life was outside my control, here was something that wasn't. I couldn't fix what had happened. I could decide what happened next.
Slowly, that started to change everything else.
Freedom isn't what I thought it was
I've written before about wanting three things from my working life: location freedom, financial freedom and time freedom.
For years I treated those as career goals. Build the right skills, earn enough, work independently and eventually escape the corporate hamster wheel. You know the one. Commute, sit in meetings about meetings, spend eight hours doing three hours of work, go home, repeat until retirement or death, whichever HR approves first.
Over the last few years they've become something much more personal.
Location freedom means not having my whole existence dictated by an office postcode. Financial freedom doesn't mean an absurd amount of money. It means enough that money stops being a constant source of anxiety, so I can look after the people who matter without feeling trapped by the next payslip.
Time freedom is the one that matters most, and the hardest to get. The ability to train in the morning, spend an afternoon with people I love, travel, work when I want to work, or have a quiet day without asking anyone's permission.
We're taught from a young age that our time belongs to someone else. School timetables, university deadlines, employers, calendars. You can get so used to having your time allocated that you forget it was ever yours.
And even once you escape the traditional structure, it's remarkably easy to build yourself another prison. More work, more commitments, more money to fund a lifestyle that needs you to keep earning more money. Congratulations. You've promoted yourself to the position of your own worst boss.
I'm trying hard not to do that. I still enjoy working. I still have ambitions, and I still get far too excited about new ideas. But I no longer want work to be the thing every other part of my life has to negotiate with for space. I want work to support my life, not the other way round.
An obvious distinction. It took me an embarrassingly large chunk of adult life to actually live by it. Wisdom doesn't arrive with age, it turns out. It gets lost in the post and turns up when you've stopped expecting it.
The bit nobody puts on Instagram
Before this turns into one of those posts about quitting the rat race and finding inner peace with a coconut on a beach, I should be clear. This version of happiness has come at a price, and not a small one.
I've had to rebuild relationships, routines, friendships and any sense of belonging. Moving to the Middle East gave me a fresh environment and the chance to build a different life. But starting again in a city full of other people who are also starting again is a peculiar experience. Everyone has a story. Some are chasing opportunity, some are escaping something, some are raising families, and some are still working out where they belong.
There's a real freedom in being an expat. There's also a real loneliness. You can build a wonderful life in Dubai, but you don't inherit the support network that might have taken decades to build somewhere else. And being away from family, my children above all, doesn't get easier because the weather's nice and the tax arrangements are favourable.
You can be happy and still carry sadness. You can be grateful for the life you've built and still wish things had gone differently. You can accept that a painful experience changed you for the better without being grateful it happened.
We don't handle that kind of contradiction well. We like neat stories: something terrible happens, the hero overcomes it, the music swells and everyone goes home vaguely uplifted. Real life is messier. Some things don't get resolved. Some losses stay losses. And what you gain doesn't cancel out what you lost.
Happiness, it turns out, isn't the absence of sadness. Sometimes it's learning that both can live in the same life.
The strange luxury of not giving a shit
Something else has happened as I've got older. I've become comfortable disappointing people.
Not deliberately. I'm not suggesting that being an inconsiderate arsehole is an advanced stage of personal development, although judging by parts of LinkedIn there's clearly a market for it. I mean accepting that other people's expectations don't automatically become my obligations.
I don't need everyone to agree with my decisions. I don't need to justify every choice, turn up to every event, chase every opportunity or keep every relationship going just because it's been around a long time. And I definitely don't need to organise my life around someone else's definition of success.
My younger self would have mistaken that for a lack of ambition. It isn't. I haven't stopped wanting things. I've got pickier about what I want. I still want to build, earn, travel and learn as much as I reasonably can. I just don't much care whether it looks impressive from the outside. I care whether it feels right from the inside.
So what actually matters now?
Ask me ten years ago what I wanted from life and you'd have got a predictable answer. Career success, financial security, a good lifestyle, recognition. Not wrong, exactly. Just incomplete.
Today the list is different.
I want to be healthy. Not just to look good, though I won't complain about that, but strong and energetic enough to enjoy the years ahead.
I want to be present for the people I love, and to make the most of every bit of time with my children, precisely because I know how painful it is when that time is limited.
I want people around me I genuinely enjoy, who don't require a performance or an explanation.
I want enough money to have choices, without so many obligations that the choices become theoretical.
And I want to keep living without feeling beholden to everyone else's expectations.
Written down, it looks suspiciously like a list any sensible person should have worked out years ago. Apparently I'm a slow learner. But knowing something and building your life around it are different things. I understood the value of my health long before I prioritised it, and the value of my time long before I stopped giving it away. Sometimes life has to make the alternative uncomfortable enough that you finally act.
The price of happiness
Here's the part I still find hard to reconcile.
I'm probably at the happiest point of my life. Not because everything is perfect, because it isn't. Not because I've achieved everything I wanted, because I haven't. And certainly not because the last few years have been easy.
I'm happy because, for perhaps the first time, the life I'm living feels like mine. Not the one I thought I was supposed to have, or the one somebody else expected me to build. Not a carefully maintained version of success designed to reassure family, friends, colleagues and the odd stranger that I'm doing terribly well, thank you very much. Just a life that reflects what matters to me. My health, my children, the people I love, my time and my freedom.
Would I have chosen the circumstances that got me here?
Absolutely fucking not.
Would I trade being separated from my children for some profound lesson about personal growth? Not for a second.
But I can't pretend it hasn't changed me. It stripped away a lot of things I once thought were essential. Some I desperately wish I still had. Others, I now realise, I'd been carrying around for no good reason.
Maybe that's what getting older is really about. Not collecting more things, more achievements or more impressive answers to "so, what do you do?" Just slowly working out what you can live without.
I'm still ambitious, still restless and still prone to taking on more than is sensible. Some habits are terminal. But I'm no longer interested in winning a game whose rules I didn't choose.
And if that means going to bed at half eight so I can get up at five and voluntarily pick up heavy objects, well, nobody said happiness had to make sense.
It's taken a frankly unreasonable number of years, a spectacular personal reset and some expensive lessons to get here. I'd like to think I've picked up some wisdom along the way. The evidence is patchy.
I'm happier than I've ever been.
I just wish the price hadn't been quite so high.
