In 2022, I thought a lot about shallow pleasure

Published on 22 December 2022

Earlier this year, my wife said something very wise. She'd been out for dinner with an old friend she hadn't seen for ages. 

“How was it?” I said. 

“Lovely,” she said, "really lovely. But now we have to go through the whole process of arranging it again. I'll send her a date, and she won't be able to make that, and on we'll go until it's 6 months later. Since Covid, and being back in the office more, colleagues are one of the things I really value about work. You just turn up and the same people are there. If you're lucky, and you have nice people in your office, you can just chat and be in each other's company. There's no need for a big catch up because you saw them all yesterday. And you'll see them tomorrow. Mostly, what you talk about is low-key. But they also end up knowing a lot about your life, the ups and downs. And it's all kept in the safe space of work."

This was the most profound thing I heard all year. It brought home to me how much I appreciate the conversations you have with colleagues.

You know how some of the best talks are on a long car journey? You're both there for the duration, there's no pressure. You're mostly staring ahead, not looking at each other and your concentration sometimes drifts as you watch the world pass by. This makes for brilliant chat. Open, meandering, silly, profound. Sharing a workplace is like that. Conversations aren't stuffed into a single coffee or a few pints, they're drawn out, extended, stretched over weeks/months/years. You develop common language references. You natter, you witter on. Books, telly, art, work, life, music, partners, children, friends. Aimless and essential. 

And I’ve just realised that my wife and I have replicated this in our living room. Sofa and arm chair, pointed at the telly like we’re on Gogglebox. Bantering away about Tom Bradby or the Midlands Weather People. I am never more happy. It’s not climbing the Eiger, but honestly, I’d just find that annoying.

Hilary Mantel once explained why she couldn’t have written her Cromwell books earlier; “I had to be in middle age to imagine what the weight of life does to you”.

It’s taken 56 years for me to understand something similar, to step back and see the amplitude of my emotional life. Imagine feelings as waveforms on an oscilloscope, the kind used by a mad scientist or an experimental musician. Some of us have waveforms that look jagged and spiky; high highs and low lows. Rapid transition. Crisis. Joy. Hollywood emotions. Dramatic. Exciting. And some of us (well, me) have long waves. Slow moving, shallow. Not quite a flat line, but closer to one. So big pleasures just worry me. I can’t lose myself in a football crowd or surrender to downhill speed. Ecstasy is embarrassing. Alcoholic madness mortifying.  

(My only exception seems to be with music. I can dance or play myself to extremes, but that always seems to be more about physicality, or physics, than feeling. Music is always a special case.)

For years I envied the emotionally spiky. Society seems to expect that depth of feeling, even if it’s held behind a stiff upper lip. But as I age I realise how lucky I am. I am satisfied with tiny pleasures. A good beat. A good tweet. A good seat. A B&B with a view of a beach. Cheap coffee. Something on toast. Idle, ill-informed wittering. I love these things. And they stick with me. A laugh over breakfast keeps me glowing all day. A shallow pleasure, but one that keeps ringing through to bedtime.   

And while my happiness is mild, my sadness seems that way too. Big bad things happened to me this year. Proper grief, my job collapsing around me, my country being ridiculous. And according to pop culture I should be devastated. But I’m not. I’m fine, upset but not destroyed. People worry that I’m holding something back, that a dam’s about to break. But, honestly, I don’t think so. I really am this superficial. Or maybe the total surface area of feeling is the same, it’s just with me it goes long. 

(And I should acknowledge just how fortunate I am. This emotional narrowness might also just be the complacency of privilege. I’d probably be flattened by proper hard times.)

So, for next year, I’m embracing my eccentric habit of trying to dragoon my friends into scheduled meetings. Oh, I don’t call them meetings, obvs. But there’s always poker, or breakfasts, or dinners, sport and random conferences. I love the regularity. The schedule. The knowledge that something’s coming soon and that you can just turn up without the need for the big ‘what’s been going on with you then?’ catchup and get straight on with the stupid chat.