Balancing Short-Term Pleasure with Long-Term Happiness

"Balancing short-term pleasure with long-term happiness." I wrote that sentence down as a note to myself while reading this week, and then I sat there staring at it for a lot longer than I expected to.

Because here's the thing that started nagging at me almost immediately: doesn't the very idea of pursuing happiness quietly assume that we're not happy yet? If long-term happiness is something out there, something we're working towards, aren't we implicitly telling ourselves that today doesn't quite count — that we're still not there, still somehow deficient, still waiting?

But then I thought about it differently. What if long-term happiness isn't a distant destination at all, but simply the sum of days like today?

Take yesterday, for example. I finished a work task that had been genuinely difficult. I spent the evening with people I love. I slept reasonably well, ate reasonably well, moved my body a little. Was that a good day? Yes, without much hesitation. Was I happy? Probably — though I couldn't measure it precisely, and I'm not sure I need to. But if I string enough days like that together, over months, over years, I'd say the honest word for the result is: satisfied. And in the bigger picture, satisfied looks an awful lot like happy.

So maybe the pursuit isn't about chasing some future emotional state. Maybe it's about protecting the conditions that make good days possible, and simply letting them accumulate.

Which raises the real question: what actually leads to that feeling?

A few things come to mind immediately.

Autonomy — the simple freedom to choose. Not necessarily big choices, but the ordinary ability to decide how you spend your morning, which task you tackle first, how you want to do your work.

Flexibility — because not everything can be planned. Emergencies happen, at work and at home, and a life that has no room to bend around them is a life that will eventually break a little under the pressure.

Accepting failure — and I don't mean the dramatic kind. I mean the small, unglamorous failures: the email you forgot to send, the bill you paid three days late. Even the most capable people fail at small things constantly. Making peace with that seems to matter more than most of us admit.

People — we spend most of our adult lives surrounded by colleagues, and this, I suspect, deserves its own post entirely. It's too big a topic to do justice to here, so I'll leave it — deliberately — for another Sunday.

Silent work — this one is very personal for me. I've noticed that one of the things that helps me most isn't more time, but protected time: closing the door, switching off the phone, focusing on a single task for a set stretch of minutes. Interruptions don't just cost me a few seconds — they knock me out of focus entirely, and getting back in can take far longer than the interruption itself.

Whose the boss? — and here's a question I keep circling back to. One of the best decisions I ever made was starting my own school. And yet, if I'm honest, there are days when I'm simply tired of carrying every decision alone. So I don't think the answer is quite as simple as "be your own boss." I believe an employee who is genuinely empowered, given autonomy and flexibility, can feel every bit as much ownership over their work as someone who owns the company outright. That feeling of participating in building something — rather than merely executing instructions — might matter more than the job title itself. But that, too, feels like a topic for its own Sunday.

For today, I'll leave you with the smaller, more immediate question: think about yesterday, or the day before. Was it a good day? What, specifically, made it one?

I'd love to read your thoughts in the comments — and if any of today's threads (people at work, or the "whose the boss" question) resonate with you, tell me. It might just decide what I write about next.

This is part of my Book Espresso, published every Sunday morning — a short reflection inspired by whatever I'm reading, for anyone who wants to start the week with something to think about.

Are You Happy?

 "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence." Aristotle wrote that a very long time ago, and yet I keep coming back to it — probably because it sounds so simple, and turns out to be anything but.

I've been sitting with this quote all week, mostly because of something small that happened on Tuesday. My daughter was in the garden with her cousin and his dog, and for a very long time nobody needed anything from us, the adults. It was a genuine pleasure to watch three creatures chase each other around in circles, absolutely delighted with the world and with each other. And I remember thinking: this is it, isn't it? This is the thing.

But here's where it gets interesting — and where I had to stop and think harder than I expected to.

Aristotle didn't actually mean happiness the way we usually use the word today. He used a Greek term, eudaimonia, which doesn't translate neatly into "happiness" at all. It's closer to something like flourishing, or living well. And he drew a sharp line between this and what he called hedonia — pleasure. A nice meal, a comfortable afternoon, a moment of fun: that's hedonia, and it's lovely, but Aristotle thought it was too fleeting, too shallow, to be the real aim of a human life.

Eudaimonia, on the other hand, comes from living in a way that reflects your values, your character, who you actually are — not just from a single good feeling, but from the whole shape of how you're living. A person could be going through something difficult and still be eudaimon, if they were meeting it with integrity, courage, love.

So which one was I feeling in the garden, watching my daughter laugh?

Honestly — both, I think. There was pure, uncomplicated pleasure in it, the hedonic kind: sunshine, laughter, a dog too excited for his own good. But underneath that, there was something sturdier too. That moment existed because of years of small choices — the kind of home we've tried to build, the relationships we've protected, the time I've fought to carve out between lessons and Book Espresso and everything else. That's the eudaimonic layer. It wasn't just a nice five minutes. It was a small piece of evidence that the life I'm building is, in fact, going somewhere good.

I think this is why Aristotle's quote unsettles people a little, if they sit with it. It doesn't ask "did you enjoy yourself this week?" It asks something much bigger: is your life, as a whole, oriented toward something worth living for?

That's a big question for a Sunday morning. So let's make it smaller.

Are you happy?

Not "generally, in the abstract" — but this week. Take a moment and think back over the last seven days, since we're back here again exactly one week later. Try to find three to five moments — they can be tiny — that made you smile without you even deciding to. A cup of coffee that was exactly right. A message from an old friend. Your child, or someone else's child, laughing at something ridiculous. A sentence in a book that made you feel understood.

Write them down if you can. Not to prove anything, but because Aristotle might be onto something: perhaps happiness isn't a destination we arrive at, but something we notice, piece by piece, in the ordinary texture of an ordinary week — if we're paying attention.

I'd love to know — what were your three to five moments this week? Tell me in the comments, I read every one.

Why do you do it? Part 2: Job Crafting

 

Job Crafting: Why I Never Do My Job the Same Way Twice

I promised myself I wouldn't turn every blog post into a Meik Wiking fan letter, and yet, here we are again. This time it's job crafting — a concept I stumbled across in The Art of Danish Living, and one that, once I read it, I realised I'd been doing for years without ever having a name for it.

So, what is it?

Job crafting is the idea that a job description is really just a starting point, not a cage. Most of us assume our role is fixed: here are your tasks, here are your hours, off you go. But research on workplace happiness — and the Danes seem to have made a national sport of studying this — suggests something rather liberating. We don't just passively occupy our jobs. We can actively reshape them, in small and large ways, to fit who we are.

There are, broadly, three ways people do this:

Task crafting — changing what you actually do day to day. Leaning into the parts of the job that light you up, and finding ways to minimise, delegate, or redesign the parts that drain you.

Relational crafting — changing who you spend your working time with, and how. Seeking out the colleagues who challenge or energise you, deepening certain relationships, adjusting how you interact with the people around you.

Cognitive crafting — and this is the quiet one, the one that happens entirely in your head. It's reframing the meaning of what you do. Not "I drill grammar into six-year-olds" but "I open a small window onto the world for someone who's only just learning to see it."

None of these require permission from anyone. That's rather the point.

How I do it, as a teacher

Running a boutique school like English with Maria, in Wołomin, with five teachers and around a hundred students ranging from toddlers to grown adults, I've had a lot of unplanned opportunities to notice this in myself.

Task crafting, for me, has looked like protecting Sunday mornings for Book Espresso — my little weekly ritual of publishing a short text and pulling different levels of learners into the same conversation. Nobody asked me to do this. It isn't in any job description, mine or anyone else's. But it lets me combine two things I genuinely love — reading and language teaching — into one task that feels like mine, rather than something imposed.

Relational crafting shows up in how I structure my week across age groups. Teaching a room of four-year-olds in the early afternoon and a group of thoughtful adults in the evening isn't just variety for variety's sake — it's a deliberate choice to keep both the playful and the philosophical sides of teaching alive in me. I need both. I'd wilt with only one.

And cognitive crafting — this is the one I catch myself doing almost daily, usually without noticing until afterwards. On the days when a lesson feels like an uphill slog, I remind myself of the "why" I wrote about a few weeks ago. I'm not correcting homework; I'm building someone's confidence to speak in a language that isn't their own. Framed that way, even the dull bits stop feeling quite so dull.

Why this matters beyond me

I think job crafting matters especially for small teams like mine. With only five of us, there's no HR department dreaming up "engagement initiatives." What there is, instead, is a genuine amount of autonomy — each teacher gets to decide, within reason, how they want to shape their corner of the school. Someone who adores working with toddlers can lean into that. Someone who finds their spark in exam preparation with teenagers can build more of that into their week. It isn't chaos; it's craftsmanship.

And I suspect this is true well beyond teaching. Whatever your job is — accountant, nurse, barista, translator — there's very likely a version of it, hiding just beneath the surface of your job title, that you could shape a little more deliberately toward what actually gives you energy.

So here's my question for you this week: if you looked closely at your own job, where's the one small corner you could reshape — a task, a relationship, or simply the story you tell yourself about why it matters?

I'd genuinely love to hear your answer in the comments.

This post continues the conversation started in "Why do you do it?" — part of an ongoing series on meaning, motivation, and happiness at work.