There was a time when happiness could be embarrassingly small. A new pencil box could make a child restless with excitement. The arrival of a cousin could transform an ordinary afternoon. The first rain could send children running outside before an adult had time to say anything sensible. A new comic book was an event. A train journey was an adventure. A birthday was anticipated for weeks. Even finding a forgotten ten-rupee note in an old pair of trousers could produce the kind of financial confidence that today requires a portfolio manager.

We did not need much to be delighted. We simply had fewer things competing for our attention, and perhaps that gave ordinary life a better chance of surprising us.

This is difficult to explain to younger people because the world we grew up in was defined by absence. If at all, there was one television, a handful of channels, one landline and a limited number of newspapers and magazines. If you wanted to know something, you had to find someone who knew it, look it up in a book or wait until the answer appeared somewhere.

Not knowing was part of childhood, and imagination had room to operate in the gap.

Today, the gap barely exists. A child asks a question and an answer appears before the curiosity has had time to mature. We hear a song and immediately know the singer, the year, the lyrics and what other people think of it. We see a strange place in a film and can locate it within seconds. We wonder whether a restaurant is good and receive thousands of opinions before deciding whether to enter it. The world has become wonderfully knowable. Perhaps it has also become slightly less mysterious.

Children once looked at the moon and wondered. Adults now know what the moon is, how far away it is, its phases and its composition. A child hears a strange sound at night and imagines a ghost. An adult reaches for Google. The ghost has lost. Google has won.

Information is one of civilisation’s great gifts. But there was something psychologically useful about not knowing everything. Mystery gave the mind somewhere to wander. Now curiosity is often followed immediately by consumption.

Something similar has happened with possessions. The generation that grew up with scarcity developed an odd relationship with having things. A new shirt mattered because there were not twenty waiting in the cupboard. A new book mattered because buying another one required a decision. A family holiday mattered because holidays did not arrive every few months.

Today, almost anything can be obtained quickly. Food arrives at the door. Entertainment waits on demand. Music is endless. Shopping is immediate. Travel can be researched down to the last café. If we want something and can afford it, there is often very little time between wanting and having.

This is progress. But progress has a strange side effect. When almost everything is available, fewer things feel precious.

Perhaps this is why childhood memories often feel disproportionately happy. The memory is not necessarily of something extraordinary. It may be of sitting on the balcony during the first rain, eating mangoes, playing cricket in a lane, waiting for a favourite programme on television or listening to an uncle tell the same story for the fifteenth time. The event was ordinary. Our capacity for delight was not.

Then came the great expansion of other people’s lives.

We have given ourselves an endless supply of other people’s lives against which to measure our own. No wonder ordinary happiness feels inadequate. Someone has a better house. Someone’s child is more successful. Someone travels more. Someone has retired earlier. Someone looks younger. Someone has started a company at 32 and is already explaining work-life balance to the rest of us.

The old neighbourhood had one neighbour to envy. The internet has supplied millions.

Today, the world’s grief can enter our living room before we have finished our tea.

We know more. We see more. We carry more. And the mind was never designed to process the entire planet before breakfast.

Perhaps this is why adults increasingly talk about wanting to switch off. What we may actually be craving is something older than technology: the ability to inhabit a small world for a little while.

To know only what is in front of us. 

To be interested in one thing. 

To be bored without immediately fixing the boredom.

Boredom deserves some rehabilitation too. It was once the blank space from which imagination emerged. A child lying on a bed with nothing to do could invent a game, draw something ridiculous, stare at the ceiling or simply wait for the afternoon to pass. Today boredom lasts long enough to unlock the phone.

The phone has become the world’s most efficient boredom exterminator. It may also be one of the most efficient imagination exterminators.

The loss of childishness becomes serious here. Childishness, in its best form, is not immaturity. It is the ability to be curious without embarrassment, excited without calculation, amused without needing a reason and absorbed without wondering whether the experience is productive.

A child can spend twenty minutes watching an ant carry a piece of food.

An adult has a meeting.

The child may have been having the better afternoon.

We should not romanticise the past. The older world had its cruelties, limitations and injustices. Scarcity was painful for many people. Technology has expanded opportunity in ways previous generations could not have imagined.

Perhaps it is simply to leave a little room for the qualities that abundance has made harder to practise.

To leave some questions unanswered. 
To take a walk without a destination. 
To eat something without photographing it. 
To hear a song without checking who wrote it. 
To let a child explain something we already know. 
To be delighted by something that would look ridiculous on a productivity chart.

And happiness does not need to be impressive.

Perhaps we are sometimes sad because we have forgotten how little it once took to make us happy.