The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary

Paperback, 269 pages

English language

Published 2023 by Aster.

ISBN:: 978-1-78325-604-4

(1 review)

Ordinary. Average. Normal.

The everyday is the wall-to-wall humdrum we seek to upgrade, like a fifties carpet we long to replace.

More money. A bigger house. A better body. An upgraded career. The ultimate relationship. A highly inconvenient psychological phenomenon called 'the hedonic treadmill' has us eternally questing for more.

Catherine Gray was a grandmaster in eye-rolling the ordinary, and at the art of everlasting reaching. Until the daemon of depression made her re-think everything. Knitting together personal storytelling and illuminating science, this book probes great minds in neuroscience and psychology.

It explodes 'extraordinary-seeking' myths such as big bucks means big happiness, expensive weddings predict marital bliss, high intensity exercise is the best kind, and the workaday is less important than the showreel.

This soulful, hilarious and life-affirming book is a manifesto on how to outwit the hedonic treadmill and retrain our negatively-biased brains. But most of all, it's a …

Ordinary. Average. Normal.

The everyday is the wall-to-wall humdrum we seek to upgrade, like a fifties carpet we long to replace.

More money. A bigger house. A better body. An upgraded career. The ultimate relationship. A highly inconvenient psychological phenomenon called 'the hedonic treadmill' has us eternally questing for more.

Catherine Gray was a grandmaster in eye-rolling the ordinary, and at the art of everlasting reaching. Until the daemon of depression made her re-think everything. Knitting together personal storytelling and illuminating science, this book probes great minds in neuroscience and psychology.

It explodes 'extraordinary-seeking' myths such as big bucks means big happiness, expensive weddings predict marital bliss, high intensity exercise is the best kind, and the workaday is less important than the showreel.

This soulful, hilarious and life-affirming book is a manifesto on how to outwit the hedonic treadmill and retrain our negatively-biased brains. But most of all, it's a love letter to an average life beautifully lived.

Because maybe, just maybe, an ordinary life is the most satisfying one of all.

1 edition

Matt reviewed The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary by Catherine Gray

The cure to depression, anxiety, and other issues

5 stars

This is a book that was recommended to me by my therapist, owing to the problems that I was having with life. It is most likely a combination of therapy and the desire to change/improve that had me reading this book.

The title of this review is deliberately provocative - we see so many things that say they're the 'cure' to things, and every single time we scoff at them because it's so not true, we have this problem and the only thing that can 'cure' this problem is for all of our problems to be fixed, for us to have what we currently do not have, and so on.

But is it true?

I realised recently that I've been going about life judging myself and defining myself not by what I have, but rather what I don't have. I don't have lots of friends, therefore I am a failure. …

This is a book that was recommended to me by my therapist, owing to the problems that I was having with life. It is most likely a combination of therapy and the desire to change/improve that had me reading this book.

The title of this review is deliberately provocative - we see so many things that say they're the 'cure' to things, and every single time we scoff at them because it's so not true, we have this problem and the only thing that can 'cure' this problem is for all of our problems to be fixed, for us to have what we currently do not have, and so on.

But is it true?

I realised recently that I've been going about life judging myself and defining myself not by what I have, but rather what I don't have. I don't have lots of friends, therefore I am a failure. I don't go out each week socialising, therefore nobody likes me. I don't have people reaching out to me, therefore I am simply unforgettable. There is no happiness to be had until I have these things.

However, this book (and by extension, my therapy) taught me that we need to stop thinking like this - and make a conscious decision to actually do so. By doing so, we realise that what we have is actually worth having, and there is a happiness in the ordinary things we do, see, hear, and feel.

Consider the people you know that you like - do you judge them by what they don't have, or do you judge them by what they have (which you also probably want)? The people you're thinking of probably also aren't necessarily happy, but you only see what they have and figure they have a decent lot in life.

This book gives extremely relateable anecdotes, stories, and studies to help us see that how we externally judge others (which is generally done with kindness, compared to ourselves) is how we need to start judging and treating ourselves. Catherine Gray herself is also supremely funny throughout the book, and I couldn't help just feeling a sort of happiness at the enjoyment of the ordinary things - because when you see them written down, you realise those are good, happy things, and they are present in your life too.

So, is this book the cure to depression and anxiety? Not really, but it's a great tool to help you overcome them, and the path to overcoming depression and anxiety is not to have our problems fixed - that's probably not possible - but rather to make peace with them and be grateful for what we do have, which surprisingly, is a lot more than you probably think you do.