Hard Days and the Happiness Mandate
The hidden pressure to be happy—and why it's making us miserable
They say there are seasons in life, and lately, that couldn’t feel more true. I don’t want this to sound like a rant, but I won’t lie, life has been serving up one bad day after another.
The first quarter of 2025 hasn’t been the social-media-worthy depiction of motivation, hustle, and glow-ups. For me, it’s looked more like putting out one crisis just in time for another to begin, and it’s safe to say I’ve felt alone, tested, defeated—then tested again, and defeated again. I’ve had moments of utter hopelessness.
But what I’ve come to remember through it all is this: it’s all perfectly normal.
One insight that brought me comfort came from a video I watched a while back, where Esther Perel talked about something she called the happiness mandate.
When I first heard her describe it, I was dumbfounded. It felt like she had finally named this quiet pressure I’d been carrying around for years. That sense that if I wasn’t happy, I was doing something wrong.
She spoke about how modern culture delivers the word happiness like a mandate, an imperative. “Don’t worry, be happy.”
That phrase—be happy—she says, perpetuates a deep belief that we are entitled to be happy, we deserve to be happy.
But what does that even mean?
And what does that look like?
Modern culture, she said, treats happiness like a goal to be reached, a destination. And when we don’t achieve it, we feel broken or behind.
It caught me off guard when I realised that I’d also been buying into the belief that I should be happy by now.
For the past few months, I’d been moving through weeks that felt heavy and hard, and somewhere in the back of my mind was this voice whispering you should be grateful or you should be happy by now.
But I wasn’t.
I was exhausted.
And the idea that I should’ve been happy made the hard days even harder. I had internalised the belief that happiness was a destination, and when I didn’t feel it, I assumed I was failing somehow.
Behind.
Missing the memo everyone else got.
It doesn’t help that we’re constantly consuming the highlight reels of people’s lives—weddings, career wins, tropical getaways, big life updates. We scroll through all of it while sitting with our own quiet heaviness and wonder: why am I not there yet?
We compare those moments to our hard days, creating a warped mirror, one where we only ever see ourselves in contrast, and always feel like we’re coming up short.
We get the urge to change something: to do more, be more, to finally get there.
But it’s funny because in chasing those highlight reels, we forget: we can have all the glossy moments too, and still feel empty.
Sometimes I scroll through my photo gallery and think, it looks like I have it all. Travels, dinner parties, nights out, fancy dresses. But in between all those photos were hard, heavy days. And I know I’m not alone in this. I know people whose lives look picture perfect on the outside, but behind the scenes, they’re silently suffering.
So then I remember: all that glitters isn’t gold.
The truth is that we’re all dealing with something.
Happiness is not a permanent state of enthusiasm, it comes through moments. We spend so much of our life thinking that if we have the next achievement, the next purchase, the next milestone, we will be happy. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness shows up in purpose, in joy, in challenge, in moments of relevance and accomplishment.
But so does suffering. They live side by side.
The more we chase this elusive thing called “happiness”, the more we’ll spiral into self-doubt. Because we’ll constantly have to ask ourselves:
Am I happy yet? Could I be happier? Should I do something about it?
It becomes a torturous loop. I see this often, people leaving relationships, jobs, or cities, believing happiness is just on the other side.
But was the problem the situation—or was it the quiet, aching belief that they should be happier than they are?
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes we do outgrow things. Sometimes leaving is the bravest, truest thing we can do. But when we leave not because something no longer fits, but because we think happiness is hiding somewhere else, we risk chasing something that can’t actually be found “out there.”
The fact is this: we live a full life and part of it will be intense experiences of happiness, just like suffering. But the pursuit of happiness as a goal keeps us chasing a moving target that was never the point.
We weren’t meant to feel one thing all the time.
And maybe that’s the point.
Not to chase happiness, but to make room for the full spectrum of being human.
So here’s to the hard days, the glossy days, and all the in-betweens, each one a reminder that we’re fully alive.
Lots of love,
A