A list of simple, mundane things that make me happy ✨

Charmie Kapoor
3 min readSep 13, 2023

Amid life’s hustle and bustle, I’ve realised that profound happiness often emerges from the simplest things. While an occasional taste of extravagance is delightful, it’s the unassuming moments that fill me with gratitude and spark creativity.

This list is a collection of everyday joys — sounds, sights, smells, and sentiments — that reveal the beauty in the ordinary.

  1. Reflection of water in a swimming pool

2. A well-formatted text

3. Shape of a serif “g”

4. Smell of fresh ink

5. Full-length mirrors

6. A silent late-night walk

7. Tall brick walls

8. All kinds of rooftops

9. Long hand-written notes

10. Sound of autumn leaves crunch

Peak fall in Boston, 2021

11. Brown-paper cover on books

12. The number 4

13. Netflix’s ta-dum sound

14. XXL t-shirts

15. Smell of freshly cut grass

16. Sun rays seeping through window slits

17. Form of a split philodendron leaf

18. Mini wooden teaspoons

19. A clean pair of sneakers

20. Raindrops on the car windshield

Bengaluru rains, 2023

21. Aloo paratha with butter and chai

22. Office’s (the show) intro sequence

43. Texture of wet clay

24. Witty writings on Paperboat’s packaging

25. Good usage of a semicolon

26. Sound of a flowing stream

27. A clean basketball shot

28. 80% dark chocolate

29. Uniball pens

30. Nike’s logo

My pair of Nike Zoom Freak 4

31. Fresh burrata cheese

32. A good usage of the em dash — especially in poems

33. Resting in Dadi’s (grandma’s) lap

34. French windows

35. The ✨ emoji

36. Soft filament bulbs

37. Crisp sound of a sharp knife chopping

38. Eating mangoes with bare hands

39. Fleece blankets

40. Meaning of the word tiramisu

“Tiramisu” in Italian means “lift me up” or “cheer me up. Tira (lift up) + Mi (me) + Su (up)

41. A no-meeting day at work

42. Well-crafted ligatures

43. The (old) Twitter’s branding

44. Diet Coke with lemon and ice

45. Vintage postcards

46. Spotify’s icons

47. Sheer curtains

48. Comfortable silences with loved ones

49. Hearing infectious laughter

50. The color heliotrope

Helitrop is a shade of deep purple with tints of pink

51. Lists :)

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Charmie Kapoor

Associate Director of Design, Unacademy • Alum: Harvard, IIT-G • Ex-Microsoft, Dunzo