There’s a line I keep coming back to:
“Happiness is your current situation minus expectations.”
It sounds like something you’d see on a café wall next to a fern and a turmeric latte but it’s sharper than that. It cuts straight to the bone of why we stay tense, distracted, scattered, and oddly dissatisfied even when things look “fine” on paper.
For a long time, I was feeding the machine.
Paying Meta. Paying consultants. Contractors. Logistics companies.
Trying to oil every moving part of the entrepreneurial fantasy, the one that promises “scale,” “growth,” and “predictability.” The one that always seems to cost more than it gives back.
It’s exhausting trying to be a business when you’re actually a person.
And the whole time, I kept thinking:
This is what I’m supposed to do. This is how a real artist runs a real business. This is how you keep up.
But underneath the pressure, I wasn’t any happier. More productive, maybe. More anxious, definitely.
Not happier.
It wasn’t until I stopped trying to engineer my life like a start-up that I realised something embarrassingly simple:
I’m a freelancer.
Not an empire.
Not a corporation.
Not an algorithm optimising for impressions.
Just one person showing up to make something honest.
And the moment I accepted that, a lot of the noise dropped away.
I didn’t need to manipulate sales.
I didn’t need to chase the market.
I didn’t need to pretend I could control forces that don’t answer to me.
There’s a Buddhist line that hits the same note:
“Abandon all hope of fruition.”
Which isn’t nihilism. It’s freedom.
It’s the relief of letting go of the idea that every effort must produce an outcome.
When I stopped trying to push the river, my life got quieter.
And when it got quieter, it got better.
That doesn’t mean I don’t want to be comfortable. I do. Anyone would.
But comfort isn’t in the hustle. Comfort isn’t in the dashboard analytics or the perfectly engineered campaign. Comfort is in the acceptance that this moment, right now, is enough.
A dear friend once said something I’ll never forget:
“I do the best I can with what I’ve got. It ain’t much, but it’s more than enough.”
That’s it.
That’s the whole philosophy.
Just showing up.
Making the work.
Trusting that the right people will meet it at the right time. Without pressure, without manipulation, without expectation.
Happiness = your life, exactly as it is minus the story you tell yourself about how it “should” be.
And once you let that go, you can finally breathe again.