{"id":7782,"date":"2026-05-20T12:07:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T09:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/the-happiness-we-lost\/"},"modified":"2026-06-01T09:47:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T06:47:23","slug":"the-happiness-we-lost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/the-happiness-we-lost\/","title":{"rendered":"The Happiness We Lost"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is an old saying: “\u201cEither you run the day, or the day runs you.”<\/em> The proverb, widely attributed to Arab folk wisdom, captures one truth well enough. But it leaves the other half unspoken. And the other half is the one that matters most: what happens after you have run it? Allow me to tell you. The answer came to me through a conversation with a friend a man who had climbed, rung by rung, to the upper reaches of the corporate ladder, then stepped off it entirely to build something of his own. He would be the first to admit that the office years were taxing. Long hours, the relentless pressure of deadlines, the stale air of a glass building sealed shut windows that existed only for appearance, never to be opened. He and hundreds of colleagues breathed the same recycled air, day after day. And yet, when he finally left all of that behind, something unexpected happened. He kept waking at six in the morning. “I am my own boss now,” he would say. “The company does not even open until nine. I could <\/em>wander for two hours. I could take my time. And yet here I am, at six, with two hours on my hands and absolutely no idea what to do with them.”<\/em> A friend of him offered him a diagnosis that was equal parts practical and poetic. He said: employment is an addiction. Leaving it requires a proper period of convalescence weeks for some, months for others, sometimes years. His prescription was simple: join a proper gym, hire a personal trainer, follow the session with a light breakfast, then begin the day’s work. It was good advice, and it helped enormously it dissolved the fog of withdrawal, lifted his energy, and steadied his mood. But then a second, more stubborn problem announced itself. When you run your own enterprise one with multiple objectives, multiple locations, multiple responsibilities, all converging on a single pair of shoulders the walls between work and rest begin to dissolve. They blur, then vanish altogether. He told me he had stopped enjoying holidays. Vacations, weekends, travel the pleasures that had once felt like gifts, earned and savoured, now felt like interruptions he could not fully inhabit. And it was not merely the grand occasions he had lost. It was the small ones the ones nobody writes about. That particular relief<\/em> the feeling at the end of a workday when you shut the office door and drive home knowing the evening belongs to you. The table set for lunch, the familiar argument about what was cooked, the indulgent afternoon nap after the midday prayer, the warmth of an evening gathering with old friends not the polished social engagements of professional life, but the effortless, obligation-free kind, where the headscarf is slightly askew and the card game runs long into the night. None of it pristine, all of it precious. All of it was gone. He had become a machine running every day of the week, present in body at social gatherings but absent in spirit, reduced to the obligatory visits and the courtesy calls. The family lunches had thinned to nothing. And worse: his children had moved through childhood, adolescence, and into young adulthood while he was elsewhere. Not far away in miles, but somewhere else entirely. He continued his story and I listened through the years that followed. Then came the technology, the digital tools, the smarter systems of delegation. They gave him permission, finally, to step back and ask himself a question he had been postponing for decades: where, exactly, am I going? He set boundaries on his working hours. He redistributed authority. He rationalised the system. And what happened surprised him: the work continued. It grew, even. But without the weight. The pressure lifted. And time real, unhurried time returned to him, as if he had just left an old job all over again. The same friend who had prescribed the morning gym sessions decades earlier now had a new prescription: return to reading. Take up yoga. Travel to places you have never been the kind of travel with an edge to it, a degree of challenge, something that asks something of you. “I am not sure what happened,” my friend told me. “I filled the time with things that mattered. And yet something came back at me like a blade from an old wound. The emptiness I thought I had outrun.”<\/em> I liked what he said. And I answered him honestly: “My friend, what you are missing is gratitude. What you carry is a blessing that many will never know.”<\/em> Be grateful when you rise each morning without pain in your back. Be grateful when you can share a breakfast table with those you love no blood sugar to check, no blood pressure reading to dread. Do not rush to reach for your phone. If the morning news holds no crisis that touches your country, receive that silence as a gift. Be grateful that you can leave your home without fear, that the streets outside are safe, that peace is the weather you move through without noticing. Before you enter your office, sit with your morning coffee sit, truly sit and let your mind go quiet. Not silent, just quiet. If you find yourself reaching for your phone, stay away from the news that will trouble you without equipping you to change anything. You will not resolve the world’s crises by reading about them at seven in the morning. You will only poison the hours ahead. When you sit at your desk, let what you do there be clean. Let your income be earned honestly. Let your work stand within the bounds of both law and conscience. And then ask yourself how your work might serve truly serve the community around you. Let that service become your speciality, your signature. Because wealth can be inherited. Companies can be passed on. Properties can be transferred. But a good legacy the kind that remains alive in people after you are gone is the only thing that outlasts us. Leave the assets and the business to your children. Hold onto the charitable work, the community work that is where you will find the happiness you thought you had lost. Time will pass more lightly, and alongside it will come a kind of reward that no balance sheet can measure. And when you come home in the evening and find the people you love in good health remember to be grateful. End your day with praise and thanksgiving, and I promise you: you will find what you lost.<\/p>\n

Stay safe <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is an old saying: “\u201cEither you run the day, or the day runs you.” The proverb, widely attributed to Arab folk…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":195991405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[50518586,50518620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swalfi-en","category-50518620"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcwyUl-21w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/195991405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7782"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7807,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7782\/revisions\/7807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adnanalothmanswalfi.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}