Unfortunately, your therapist was right.

I get absolutely peeved off when someone has the audacity to look me dead in the eyes and say, ‘I told you so.’ Therefore, I hope my therapist, my parents, and my older brother never happen upon this article because (unfortunately for my pride) they were right.

The fucked up world we live in right now makes it significantly harder to feel happy. This is a Fact (I am wholeheartedly just assuming there is a study somewhere that agrees with this). We have all become over-thinkers or underthinkers to combat the highly stimulating, socially-declining atmosphere that festers stress and grows guilt. With all the terrible things happening right now, feeling happy can be tethered to little spores of guilt. Guilt that you get to experience something enjoyable while others do not. Unfortunately, this is a product of the current environment, but you can't let it choke you. These minuscule spores of stress and guilt will block our airways over time - obstructing our ability to feel happiness, joy, and even contentedness. We don’t really notice it until our nose is blocked, and we all become little mouth breathers struggling for air. So we need to clear it; we need to learn how to find joy without guilt.

I’m not talking about being smiley all the time and ignoring your emotions, but rather finding small moments in your day that stay with you for just a second longer than the others. Even just the small things you observe, there shouldn't be guilt in observing the world around you and searching for something to make it better. I think in this chaotic world, we turn into ourselves to find joy because we may fear the judgement of those who spend every second stressed over the world. But we do not have to be perfect people who propogate change and progress at every minute of the day. As cliche as it sounds, you are allowed to be imperfect. In fact, I would argue it is a necessary component of human character. This drive to be perfect is the particle the spores of guilt travel on, delivering it right to our bodies. As I have been told many times by my therapist, we have to actively work to upend social expectations of ourselves, and I think that is what finding joy in observations is doing. Personally, I am an overthinker, someone who could spend hours thinking about all the ways my day could go or how one global event will affect the rest of the world. But I've spent the past few months being aware of the few seconds that linger during the day, and I have about 40 pictures of the same ducks I walk past every week to prove it. In these few seconds where I stand and think about the duck's little routine synching with mine, that particle of perfection dislodges slightly, and the ease of imperfection swirls in the air instead.

But what do we do with all these imperfect moments of joy? Must we tell someone? Keep it to ourselves in fear it will be ridiculed? Take photos or videos? I don't know. Which sounds crazy because I am writing a piece about it, but I don't. Human culture is based on storytelling, imperfect ones at that. Our cultural evolution spans from cave paintings depicting hunting strategies and traditional knowledge to starting new social movements and even political events. Storytelling is beneficial not only for listeners but also for the speaker. We can take these little crackles of something warm and start to bundle them up until it heats up. We can relive, realise, or redirect happiness as the storyteller. However, I am not necessarily instructing you to tell your best friend about every single event that makes you happy - you would probably no longer have that best friend. Write about it, think about it, speak it into awaiting air (personally, I tell the ducks I am so happy to see them on that day). Just do something with the joy so that you begin to trust it. You start to trust that you can find happiness in a world that strives to make us uneasy, a world that spends most of its time shoving perfection and performance down our throats.

Listen, I know I sound like your parent or your counsellor or just some wellness guru, but unfortunately, they may have a point about focusing on the small things (not the wellness guru; they probably are getting paid to say that). Maybe it's the first few seconds of the song you’re listening to on repeat, watching a bad driver get honked at, or perhaps just watching a bird swim down a creek. But joy is crucial, and in a world where it is an accelerant for hatred, learning how to find it in one second of the 86,400 seconds in your day will help us breathe better in the smoke.