Can you keep a secret? Try, it’s good for you

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘And Everything Will Be Glad To See You’

By the time you’re reading this, I will have told someone my secret. 

In all honesty, as one of life’s oversharers, I will probably have told quite a lot of people my secret but at the time of writing it remains true to the name: nobody knows but me. 

It’s a nice secret, perfectly pitched and correctly sized: it won’t change my life much, and it’s unlikely to change anyone else’s at all, but I’m pretty pleased about it all the same. And I’m probably more pleased about it, all things considered, because it’s still a secret. 

The thing about keeping my secret is that I don’t have to justify it. I don’t have to explain it or excuse it; take any of the many necessary next steps; apologise for my frivolity at a sombre time (spot the millennial); or expect anyone else to be as chuffed about it as I am (or be disappointed when they aren’t). There’s nobody to be jealous of my secret; nobody to cut it down to size; and — while the lure of a glittery Instagram post is very real — it doesn’t need a filter to shine. It doesn’t have to be anything it isn’t, which makes it even better. While it’s mine it’s just my secret: a metaphorical hot-water bottle up the jumper against the cold. I’ll be fine! I’ve got my secret! 

Happily, then, it seems that science backs me up. While a problem shared is a problem halved, a joy shared might also — according to a new study — be a joy halved. Researchers at Columbia University, conducting five separate experiments on more than 2,500 participants, have published a paper in which it’s made clear that discretion really is the better part of valour: if you share your good news too soon, you lose the buzz. 

Secrets get a bad rap these days. The word has fallen significantly out of favour in parenting (no secrets in this family) and received wisdom tells us that bottling things up only lets them fester. We live in the age of the like and the share: a heart emoji for a kid with cancer, a flag emoji for the war-torn nation, a broken heart for a celebrity death or divorce. Mental health campaigns urge us to just talk. “Reaching out” is the order of the day. Even public transport insists that we see it, say it and thus it is sorted.

If a tree falls in a forest and nobody posts a leaf-strewn, autumnal image on Instagram, did it really happen? Silence may be golden, but not — perhaps — as golden as the “Mayfair” filter. 

I’ve spent my life talking about my life. As a memoirist, I’ve sold years of the highs and lows in order to fund the next one. And I’ve regretted it. No, let me rephrase: I’ve rarely regretted sharing the tough parts, the places where I’ve found solidarity with the caring or the grieving or the mad. But I have often regretted, in hindsight, sharing the good. There are moments in there that I might have wanted to keep wordless and small: free of the narrative that comes, inevitably, with telling someone something.

Good news seems to me to be more fragile than bad; it’s hard to put a good spin on something that undoubtedly sucks, but it’s pretty easy to puncture someone’s bubble if you want to. The world is a tough place. It’s full of spikes and trouble. Hanging on to the joyful, the silly, the little and the lovely is all we have to get through the day. 

A less-reported, but no less charming, element of this Columbia study: participants were given a list of possible pieces of small good news, and asked to check off how many of them they were currently experiencing. On average, they checked off 15. Fifteen bits of small good news happening to the average person on any given day seems like something worth celebrating — and perhaps, instead of talking about it, we might just decide to notice them instead.  

The autumn light, unfiltered. A train pulling up as you step on to the platform. And my secret, full of promise and quiet glee — and no, I’m not going to tell you what it is.