THE SMALL THINGS

According to TikTok, we’ve forgotten this was the whole point’. Olivia Petter asks if the latest online trend is a positive step or a depressing symptom of our disconnected times

- Olivia Petter

We were two glasses of orange wine deep when the admission finally came. "I want to be with someone whose entire focus isn't their career," my friend sighed, after spending the better part of our weekend lunch bemoaning his failed relationships. "I love it when people are ambitious," he clarified. "But there needs to be an awareness that not everything is about professional success. That there are other, more important, things we should be paying attention to. Like just being around friends and going on trips. Isn't that what it's all for?"

His words rang through my head all day, like a Christmas song on repeat in a supermarket in November. As someone who considers themselves fairly career-driven, I definitely fall into the category of someone who pays significantly less attention to the other things in my life.

These other things - or the "what it's all for" stuff - can be split into two sections. The major ones: birthday parties, festivals, weddings, road trips, holidays and so on. And the minor (but arguably more special) ones: drinking bad coffee in an unkempt Airbnb on a hangover and cackling with an old friend, poring over screenshots of texts some terrible man sent to your best mate, dancing till 2am in a tiny club surrounded by the sweaty bodies of strangers. Singing for no reason. Laughing with new colleagues. Crying with old ones. And so on.

It might sound a bit "manic pixie dream girl", and maybe I am guilty of watching that video of Drew Barrymore in the rain too many times. But I'm not the only one subscribing to this feeling, one I can only describe as a compulsion to live for the small joys in life rather than always fixating on the big, often moneydriven, successes.