“Living the dream” is a regular, old, probably HR-questionable joke that gets wheeled out at work almost every day.

Me: “How’s it going?”

Colleague: “Living the dream.”

Me: “Congratulations.”

Nobody laughs particularly hard anymore. It’s become one of those workplace traditions, like pretending the printer will behave today or believing the meeting scheduled for thirty minutes will actually last thirty minutes.

“Living the dream” is the standard response whether you’re having the best day ever or you’ve just discovered someone has finished the milk and put the empty carton back in the fridge.

But it struck me today that buried underneath the sarcasm there is actually quite a lot of truth.

I am living the dream.

Not the Instagram version, obviously.

There are no private jets. Nobody is handing me the keys to a villa in Italy. I don’t wake up looking like I’ve stepped out of a shampoo advert, and my lottery numbers continue to display an impressive commitment to not being selected.

But when I was a little girl, my dream wasn’t glamorous.

I didn’t dream of yachts or designer handbags or becoming fabulously wealthy. I dreamed of growing up. Of owning my own house. Having a husband. Two dogs. A job. That was it. Simple.

Looking back now, I realise my childhood ambitions lacked a certain level of imagination. I could have aimed for astronaut, world-famous author or Queen of Somewhere Interesting.

Instead, I basically aspired to become a fully functioning adult, self-reliant, financially stable and someone who owned a vacuum cleaner.

And somehow… I did it.

Don’t get me wrong. Adult life isn’t quite the glossy brochure we were promised.

The house constantly needs something fixing. The dogs seem convinced that every muddy puddle was personally created for their entertainment. Work has days where the coffee isn’t strong enough and the emails breed overnight and my husband occasionally asks, “Where’s the thing?” despite the thing living in exactly the same place for the last ten years.

I think that somewhere along the way we started believing dreams had to be extraordinary. That unless you’re travelling the world, earning millions or appearing on television, you’ve somehow settled.

Maybe the dream is as simple as having people and animals waiting for you when you get home. Maybe it’s having a place that feels safe, even if the skirting boards need painting. Maybe it’s laughing with colleagues over the same terrible joke every single day.

Maybe the dream is ordinary.

Ordinary, when you stop to look at it properly, is actually quite extraordinary and I’ve achieved what I ultimately wanted to achieve.

So tomorrow, when someone asks me how I’m doing, I might still smile and say, “Living the dream.”

Only this time…

I’ll mean it.