Tall poppy syndrome, quiet disclaimers, and twenty years of adding a "but" to every good thing. I'm only now learning to let happiness stand on its own.
I used to downplay good news. Not in an obvious way. I wouldn't lie about things going well. I'd just soften it. Add a qualifier. Mention something hard alongside it so the good part didn't land too cleanly.
“Business is going well, but it’s been stressful.” “Yeah, we love living in Saigon, but it’s not for everyone.” “Life’s good at the moment, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”
I did this so automatically I didn't even notice it until my wife pointed it out. She said something like, "Why do you always add a 'but' when something good happens to you?" And I didn't have an answer. Not a real one.
It took me months of sitting with that question before I understood what I was doing. I was apologizing for being happy. I'd been doing it for twenty years.
Where the habit started
I can't trace it to one specific moment. It was more of an atmosphere. Growing up in Australia, there was a strong cultural current around not getting too big for yourself. Tall poppy syndrome, they call it. If you stood out, if you seemed too pleased with yourself, someone would cut you back down.
And it wasn't always malicious. Sometimes it came from friends, from family, from people who genuinely cared. But the message underneath was consistent: don't shine too bright. It makes people uncomfortable.
So I learned to dim.
Not dramatically. I didn't hide or shrink. I just developed a reflex. Whenever something was going well, I'd scan the room. Who here might feel bad if I say this? Who's struggling right now? How do I share this without making someone feel worse about their own situation?
That sounds considerate. And in small doses, maybe it is. But when it becomes your default setting, it stops being kindness and starts being something else entirely.
The cost of constant dimming
Here's what I didn't understand for a long time. When you apologize for your happiness often enough, you start to distrust it. The good feeling arrives and immediately there's a second voice asking whether you deserve it, whether it's appropriate, whether someone else would resent you for it.
You stop enjoying things cleanly. Every good moment comes with a small tax.
I noticed this most in my work. When something succeeded, my first instinct wasn't to feel good. It was to manage how the success appeared to others. Downplay the numbers. Emphasize the struggle. Make sure no one thought it came easily, even when parts of it did.
And with friends, especially old friends back home, I caught myself editing constantly. Leaving out the parts of my life that were working because I didn't want to seem like I was rubbing it in. Living in Vietnam, running my own business, having flexibility with my time. These are things I worked for and chose carefully. But I talked about them like accidents. Like I'd stumbled into a life I hadn't earned.
That's not humility. That's a flinch disguised as manners.
What's actually underneath it
When I sat with this during meditation, what I found wasn't complicated. It was a belief, simple and old, that my happiness could hurt people. That if I was doing well and someone near me wasn't, my good fortune was somehow making their situation worse.
That's a strange thing to carry around. Because when I flip it, I can see how untrue it is. When someone I love is thriving, genuinely thriving without apology, it doesn't make me feel worse. If anything, it gives me something. It reminds me that a good life is possible. It's encouraging, not threatening.
But the belief isn't rational. It was installed early and it runs in the background. It doesn't ask for permission.
There’s a Buddhist idea I find useful here: mudita, often translated as sympathetic joy. It means taking genuine happiness in someone else’s happiness — not performing it, not forcing it, but actually allowing yourself to feel glad when something good happens for another person.
And lately, I’ve started to wonder whether it’s hard to offer that kind of joy to others if you can’t first allow some version of it for yourself. If your own happiness feels like something to apologize for, other people’s happiness can start to feel complicated too.
The people who taught me something different
Living in Saigon has helped. Living in Saigon has helped. I don’t want to generalize too much about Vietnamese culture, but in the everyday life around me, I’ve noticed a directness about joy that I didn’t grow up with in Australia.
People celebrate loudly. They share good news without wrapping it in disclaimers. A neighbour buys a new motorbike and the whole alley knows about it by lunchtime. No apology. No "but."
At first, that made me uncomfortable. It felt like showing off. Then I realized the discomfort was mine, not theirs. They weren't being arrogant. They were just happy and saw no reason to hide it.
My daughter is like that too. She's still young enough that joy is uncomplicated for her. She builds a tower out of blocks and yells for everyone to come look. There's no moment where she checks the room first. No calculation about whether her tower might make someone feel bad about theirs.
I watch her and think: that's what it looked like before I learned to edit myself.
Unlearning at 37
I'm not going to pretend I've fixed this. The reflex is still there. Last week someone asked how the business was going and I watched myself reach for a qualifier before I'd even finished the sentence. "Good, really good, but we'll see how the next quarter goes."
We'll see how the next quarter goes. As if I needed to pre-emptively cancel the good news in case it made someone uncomfortable.
But I'm catching it more. And sometimes, not always, I let the good thing stand on its own. No hedge. No downplay. Just: things are good right now.
It's a small thing. But after twenty years of adding a "but" to every piece of happiness, saying it plainly feels like something close to honest.
