My childhood was one of survival and resilience. How can I model a joyful life for my kids? | Parents and parenting

I’m a child of first-generation immigrants and have always carried a story of survival and resilience. My parents were part of a “lost generation” who sacrificed a lot to put us all through university. There was a very defined path for success, some of which I followed and some not. I married outside of race; I made work choices for financial stability. I don’t know how to enjoy things that other people seem to. Hobbies, travelling, home renovations … I look at those like “what is the point?”

I want to say it’s because my upbringing was not full of leisure activities; my parents only allowed us to focus on academic topics. Now that I’m a mother though, I wonder how I can role model some of this “living well for its own sake” for my children. It’s hard to find simple joys actually joyful. Growing up, everything needed to be “applied” towards something, and it feels that mentality is informing everything I do. Any advice on how to break free and live in the moment?

Eleanor says: Sometimes the means take over the end. Like a strangler fig. We start out doing something as a way of achieving something else we value – as a means to an end. But over time, it takes up so much of our schedule and mental prioritisation that it starts to twist and wrap around the things we actually value. It crowds them out, competes for vital nutrients, until it wins. It becomes the thing we value for its own sake; the means become the end.

It happens with money. We start trying to get money for the good life it’ll bring, but over time we’ll throw parts of a good life on a pyre for the sake of getting more money.

And it happens with hard work.

Your parents decided to sacrifice, work hard, give things up. The original reason to do that was as a means to a better life. That’s why it’s worth making the mammoth sacrifices immigrant families make: leaving the place and people they knew, working hard in a new country, sometimes in multiple jobs or new languages. Nobody thinks it is worth doing these things because they are a temple to worship for their own sake. It is worth doing these so that life will be better for the generation after you. It is a means to an end – that things will be better for your kids.

Over time, though, the means can become the end. The organising mythos can become that we work hard to work hard; that it is the thing worth valuing for its own sake.

To think that way is to let the real value get strangled. Exactly like you said, everything growing up needed to be towards something. Couldn’t your quality of life, and your child’s, be what you were all working towards? Wasn’t a better life the point?

You asked how to break free.

Start with the feeling, not the activities. Don’t approach leisure as if it also needs a defined path. Other people might find joy in travel and home renovations, but you don’t have to. The first (only?) question is: what ignites a feeling of joy in you?

It can take time to get back in touch with your own reactions to things. Like finding the mind-muscle connection to a disused part of your body, if you’re long out of touch with asking “Do I enjoy this?” you may have to ask many times before you can detect the answer.

So don’t start with the hope that things will deliver joy and in-the-moment immersion right away. It might not feel like that at first. You can start in an exploratory way instead. Fieldwork. How does this make me feel? What can I detect in myself?

The joys that come to you might be totally specific to you. Some people feed crows. Some people dance disco. Some people preserve weeds. Making more room for enjoyment in your life is also the task of making more room for your actual self – how you actually feel, what you actually like. When you’re slow and still enough to ask what you truthfully feel about something, you’re already living more in the moment.

Your parents sacrificed a lot for you, and you’ve worked hard to honour that. You can cash in some of the hard-earned chips – be the person for whom life could be better – without feeling like it’s wrong. The point wasn’t to accumulate chips for the chips’ sake. Don’t let the means become the end.

The reader’s letter has been edited.

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