On 2023
Life
Van Gogh, Sun from the Sower
Quick Summary: In this Substack, I look at what I’ve learnt this year, about happiness and the difference between living for myself and the idea-of-myself, and round off with 23 chunks of wisdom.
Merry Christmas everybody! Last column of 2023. Thank you lovely readers (especially Clare W from Sham. The siblings passed on your comments, and they made my week.)
I came across an Old English word the other day - Hordwynn, literally ‘hoard joy’. It’s meant to refer to the joy from collecting, but I’d like to think of it as a Joy Hoard instead. 2023 has been my Hordwynn, my Joy Hoard - a collection of happy times I am sitting on like a dragon, a memory hump that I have fattened up over the course of this year.
This year I’ve become a kind of Joy Sommelier. I’ve learnt about the differences between joy and awe, gratification and contentment, the joy that lies in habits and the joy that is held in memories. I’ve learnt that joy can be structured even if it’s a structure of wiggling fields rather than straight lines. I’ve learnt I can spend an entire year really happy, that I have a capacity for consistent, compounding joy in me. That there may be times when I am stressed or sad, but often that will be a stress or a sadness that I have chosen in the service of something else - not something I have to accept as simply a feature of how I understand and exist in the world.
This year I wanted a yellow year, a golden year and - man - has 2023 delivered. Normally, New Year is my favourite time of year. Something about the blank page, the un-fucked-upness of it all, the new start - I’ve always liked the feeling of being able to begin again, the promise of what might come, how I might be and what I might do. But NYE this year is a little bittersweet. I’m excited for 2024, but I am wistful about letting 2023 go.
I know this year is not a magic wand, that I won’t suddenly skip through life with no low spells. But this was a proof of concept, a demonstration that I can be consistently happy for a sustained period of time - and for that reason I will always hold so, so much love for 2023.
***
Matresence is a process of neural rewriting after the birth of a child. It’s a kind of synaptic pruning. Areas of the brain that are deemed inessential are culled to allow for a total focus on the one goal of raising the baby.
Think about what this tells us about our brains. If we love, and we want, and we care about something enough, our brain will oblige us by literally rebuilding itself into something that will fit this purpose.
For a long time, I have loved a spoken life - the sentences that I can say to make up who I am in the minds of others. This social entity, this negative space in the middle of all these reliefs of the ideas that others have of me has been a little like my baby. I have worked for her, cared for her, spent the time when I was alone improving her or feeling guilty for not doing so. I have looked after this concept, this idea of Lauren-Levine with a pretty hefty amount of dedication.
Like a Narcissus-Pygmalion-hybrid, other things have fallen by the wayside in caring for her, this spoken idea of who I am. I haven’t painted or played music, or done the things I am bad at - because this isn’t something I can tell people about. I haven’t mooched contentedly, because this time was slipping away and I was letting this spoken self down. Shamefully, I often haven’t listened because I was too busy thinking about what it was I would say next, how I would continue to build this idea of who I was. I feel like I have had my own little matresence. I’ve been so focused on looking after this concept that my brain has rewired itself around that goal.
This is pretty ridiculous, because this baby, this ‘idea of myself’ is really code for just caring way, way, way too much about what other people think of me.
A very wise friend showed me a TikTok last year that asked ‘are you living for yourself, or are you living for the idea of yourself’. I had a bit of a spluttery-ooo-err reaction at the time. It cut a little bit too close to home. I’d realised how much what I did, and the decisions I made were dictated by the idea of myself - how much this idea had become my baby, and what I was giving up for her. So this was the year that I changed the equation - that I let go of the living for the idea of myself, and tried living for myself alone.
As a result I got worse, deliciously worse, in so many wonderful ways. I have less friends and less stuff, and I am less fit, less smart, less employable, less wealthy, less well dressed, less sharp - less lots of things than I’ve ever been - and yet so much happier. When asked the classic ‘so what are you up to now?’, my answer is not ‘university student’ or ‘management consultant’ or ‘working in a start up’ - but instead, the decidedly unimpressive ‘In my Feckless Era’. I’m tempted to shorten it further - to say that I am simply in my ‘Less Era’. And I love it.
So HOORAY for this getting worse and what it represents. Hooray for the benign neglect of this social self in return for the one who exists behind closed doors. Hooray for allowing myself to get worse, but in doing so giving myself the space for pockets of joy, for so many moments that I cannot remember but I know have existed because I have taken the time to allow them to do so. For all the beautiful things that only I have seen, only I will see and that I will never be able to capture or describe. So many wonderful things that are mine and mine alone. Hooray for this fantastically feckless year.
***
Finishing off with a cheeky listicle (HORRIBLE word) of what I’ve learnt in 2023. (Caveat - I’m aware this is all the wisdom of a 23 year old, and this will probably seem hopelessly naive when I’m 30/24/23-and-three-quarters. Ah well. What’s a Substack for if not making you cringe a little later down the line.)
23 Things I’ve Learnt in 2023
It’s super arrogant to think you can solve a lot of the big questions about how to live a life. If looking for happiness, what’s natural is not always what’s right, but it’s normally a very good place to start. Some things are a matter of instinct not intellect, and - in a very uncertain world - there’s a lot of wisdom in nature and thinking about what we’ve evolved to do rather than treating everything in life as an optimisation problem to be solved.
Underpack. Chuck everything in the bag. At the end of a trip, when your bags heaving with all the new stuff you’ve bought, roll everything. It’s amazing how much space you get. (Alternatively, simply forget to pack everything in the wardrobe in Ethiopia.)
Sleeping less increases the amount of time you’re conscious but decreases the amount of time you’re Conscious, properly Alive-with-a-capital-A. (Also, early unfiltered sunlight is the best sleep aid). For me - I can survive off 6, but I feel amazing on 9.
Bar soap is way better than shower gel. Just is.
Physics, Greek myths, beginners biology, languages - all give wonderful layers with which to interact with the world. Layers that allow you to walk through the world with interesting things to think about, to anchor the things you see around with a substructure, with concepts and heft.
Scouting for Girls and Elton John are fantastic.
When you pour stuff pour with the whole cup over the saucer - if it does that weird bendy dribble, it only goes on the plate.
You can trust in the value of unremembered and unevidenced time if you can be confident in your habits, if you know that you have made a habit of joy.
Two of the best snacks are toasted almonds from a frying pan and sliced big tomatoes with salt.
Effort is a strange thing. It only ever impacts probabilities - makes things more or less likely. But we live in binaries - things either do or don’t come off. So outside the world of exams and academia, there’s the very strange thing of it being really hard to know if your effort has paid off.
Always keep some plants about. Even if it’s tiny house plants like basil. Have something you’re tending to.
There’s normally three or four levels of explanation for whatever you’re feeling. There’s the events level of what prompted the feeling, but there’s also a biological and psychological layer of why this has affected you on this way. Be wise to this, and be generous in the levels you choose to explain the actions of others. Toleration is the ability to regard someone as a collection of causes when required.
A candle, a blanket, nice tea and incense can make anywhere feel like home (thank you Mali!)
Generalisations (alcohol causes cancer/ more social people tend to be happier/ exercise is good for you) are interesting academically, but pretty useless when it comes to framing a life for yourself. There’s too much variation, too many other variables. You’re far better off doing small experiments to find what works for you. You can’t frame a life from the top down.
The reason people bird watch is because when you see a bird the scene in front of you is unique. The movements of birds means no one has seen what is there in quite the same way. They’re specialifiers.
Right actions can still lead to the wrong outcomes.
You’re only going to do Things for part of the day. The Not-Thing time will always exist, and whether it’s a source of recrimination or joy is a question of attitude.
You do learn some stuff from going through a tough time. But also - once you have that knowledge - you don’t learn any more from going through all of that again. Additional rounds are just gratuitous.
We forgive in ambiguities, in not knowing how much the person that wronged us is reflected in the person that apologised. We apologise in certainties, in knowing that the self that wronged is part of the self speaking now. We can forgive almost anything if we’re willing to regard others as equally complex causal chains as ourselves (the feeling this prompts is called ‘sonder’).
Anything is possible if you can break it down into 5% chunks.
Novelty is a quick way of preserving time - I wasn’t someone who had Xed and now I am. But habit is a heavier way of preserving time - I am an Xer, I am one who does this.
When haggling abroad, split the difference between the local price and the price you’d pay back at home. You’ll massively overpay for everything, but still feel like you’ve got a good deal and it means you’ll pass on more money to the local economy. There’s nothing worse than an overly zealously haggling tourist.
You can trace joys. It’s like dreaming backwards, looking at all the events and causes that brought you to a joyful moment, the contingencies that has to fall into place, the fragile things that had to happen. Like inverse-brooding. Worrying them in this way gives them the same patina of inevitability as the problems you dwell on, gives you a structure and account of your life as something joy-directed.
Happy Christmas everybody. See you in 2024. Have a wonderful holiday!
Proust - our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it - Within a Budding Grove
Seneca - Mak it his business 'to learn how to feel joy'... real joy is a 'severe matter'