Class of 1975

On the eve of the New Year I find myself reflecting on what I have in common with Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, David Beckham, Enrique Iglesias, Natalie Imbruglia and Tiger Woods.

The answer is, of course, nothing, except that we share the birth year. We were all born in 1975, the Year of the Rabbit. We're all aged 33. I only tend to dwell on this when I come across their interviews in magazines, because let's face it, it can all be very depressing.

For goodness' sake, they've got it all: the looks, the career, the man, the woman, the talent, the money, and a mini-bus load of adorable kids. They're either heart-throbs or handsome hands-on daddies, goodwill ambassadors or pin-up earth mothers. It makes me sigh like a 99-year-old. Jesus! How did they get their life to run so smoothly? And how come mine, to quote the Queen herself, is more horribilis than mirabilis?

Don't you think that in this celebrity culture everyone always seems beautiful, rich, happy and fulfilled, and we, by comparison seem plain, poor, beset with small miseries and chronically unfulfilled?

I found the answer in The Thrift Book which I very much recommend as being very uplifting in these dire times. The author India Knight says the celebrity culture makes us forget how to be realistic with our expectations: "Part of the reason so many of us feel obscurely dissatisfied in some way is to do with our strange and deluded expectations."

Well we can't be blamed, can we? It's human nature to compare and to look up to people who seem to be doing extremely well. And whereas before it was a matter of competing with the neighbours, now we barely know our neighbours but we know the insides out of celebrities' lives.

This starts from a tender age. My two-year-old, despite extremely restricted TV watching time, is already celebrity-influenced. She is currently only answering to the name Mickey (short for Mickey Mouse, in case you were wondering). And I am Goofy. (Which of course can be a bit of a hitch when you're in the middle of a busy outlet at the height of Christmas shopping, and suddenly you hear this tiny but definitely booming voice shouting: "Goofy! I can't see you!", and you cringe at the sound of all the necks craning to see this Goofy.)

As we grow up, Mickey gives way to Zac Effron who then gives way to Britney Spears and to David Beckham whose move to AC Milan this week has been minutely recorded - down to the panties he was wearing. Over the years of constant subconscious media bombardment, we end up losing an important feeling, the feeling of being content with the little things in life.

For my generation, happiness has become goal oriented. We plan like mad. We organise events in the form of holidays, outings and bashes and put ourselves under sheer pressure to be happy about them. We strive to be 100 per cent happy all the time and feel like failures if we aren't. We look around us and feel everybody has the full score of happiness except us - and that we shouldn't be making do with 80 per cent. So we ditch whatever is not fulfilling (relationship, job, house, friendship, move country) and start anew.

By the time we realise that life is made up of occasional ups and downs, with the huge chunk in between made up of the greyness of nothing-out-of-the-ordinary routine, more than half our life would have passed by. Our parents haven't spent a lifetime crusade searching for everlasting happiness, they are just finely tuned to different levels of contentment as life goes on.

So the motto from now on has to be to resist the temptation to flick through Hello! and OK! magazines next time we're at the airport. I plead guilty to having done just that before I sat down to write this. No more. My mantra for 2009 is to live life in a super-simple mode, Goofy style.