It had been one of those weeks. It was not that anything had gone badly wrong, but more that nothing had gone particularly right. It could have been different – a push here, a nudge there, and it would have been a good week. But neither push nor nudge came and so it ended on the unsuccessful side of mediocre.
Little wonder then that, waking up on Saturday, I was in a bit of a funk. Not a bad mood or anything so dramatic, but certainly a few degrees below chipper. I wandered to the kitchen, made a coffee and logged on once more to take a ring-side seat for the warm-up acts for the apocalypse.
As I flicked from email to news to social media, something strange happened. My mood lifted. I didn’t just get back to some state of equanimity, I became positively perky. Little pops of happiness poked through my previously gloomy disposition.
Nothing had happened to cause this, as far as I could tell. I hadn’t won the lottery or received a pledge of undying love from a Hollywood starlet (just a matter of time, surely). The news was what the news generally is these days; there were no messages or likes to spark a little hit of dopamine.
And yet, there it was, a decided sense of happiness.
And very welcome it was too. Most of us, given the option, would choose to be happy rather than faintly gloomy. That’s just the way we work.
But I hadn’t chosen to be happy.
And I hadn’t done anything to bring it about. I had just done what I usually do on a Saturday morning – gloomy, perky or somewhere in between. I had visited the same websites, drunk the same coffee, sat on the same sofa.
It was a nice, sunny morning certainly, but it had been nice and sunny when I was in bed, and my mood certainly hadn’t been. There have been plenty of nice, sunny mornings recently – it’s spring, it goes with the territory.
Pleasing though my perkiness was, it was also, at one level, faintly disconcerting. I hadn’t chosen it and I couldn’t explain it. Yet there it was. Whatever had caused it (some hormone of which I’ve never heard, perhaps) was beyond my grasp.
As I thought back to my waking funk, I realised that it could be the same. If my perkiness had arisen without my understanding, it might have done too. I could see reasons why it would have been understandable for me to feel a bit low, but I couldn’t say for sure that they were why I had felt that way. Perhaps, noticing my mood, my mind had just reached for a plausible explanation and decided my less than perfect week was good enough.
Sometimes the cause of an emotion is clear. If someone stands on your toe, the flash of anger that accompanies the pain is almost certainly related. But background emotions are harder, those feelings that just sit there and colour your day. Not one and done, but the general disposition which hangs around for a while, the cast of mind which dictates how you react to the events of the day.
Those emotions matter more. If you’re in a funk, everything just seems that bit harder. Small irritations become large annoyances. Problems get put aside and solutions abandoned at the first sign of trouble. On your perkier days, of course, nothing is a threat, everything is an opportunity. The world positively abounds with possibility.
With such stakes, it would be nice if we could reliably engineer positivity. But if we do not know how it arises, that’s not going to be easy. Anything we did would be akin to an ancient people doing a rain dance – it might work, but that would probably be a coincidence.
But those people still managed to survive. They just accepted the conditions and adapted to them. Experience taught them that sun followed storm. They knew that eventually the rain would come to an end. So too with our moods. We know that they pass. At some point perkiness will return – whether we do something to bring it about or not. A bad mood is like a rain shower – temporary. We do not, generally, assume that the first spots of rain on the window portend Noah’s Flood: The Sequel. Nor should we assume that waking up on the wrong side of the bed one morning condemns us to a life of misery.
Because they seem to be inside us, we assume our emotions are us – I am grumpy, I am happy. But when it rains, we think “It is raining” more than “I am wet”. If our moods are similarly mysterious, and similarly beyond our control, better to treat them like the weather. Things that come and go on their own schedule, things to which we adapt. This too shall pass. And knowing it shall pass makes it less important, more bearable. We can’t stop the rain, but we don’t let the rain stop us. Why should our moods?
“In the midst of winter, I found that there was, within me, an invincible summer,” wrote Camus. There’s winter too. And spring and autumn. They all appear in their time, not ours. And the world keeps turning.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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It’s called ennui…