Becky Milligan is a reporter on Radio 4.
The question is: what makes you happy? What makes you laugh so hard you’re sick on the floor? Are you happier than sadder? Or so-so, on cruise control, or just below par? And what makes you cry, sob into your sandwiches, howl into a feather pillow to muffle your anguish. What does it for you?
The other day I was on the 87 bus sitting on the upper deck admiring the long blue sky and sparkly clean Thames, Parliament in full glorious view as we steamed over Vauxhall Bridge. I made my way down those vertical stairs and the bus suddenly lurched to the right, tossing me to the left. Through no fault of my own I found myself kneeling on the floor beside a smart young man with my face planted in his groin. I stayed down there a second too long, longer than was decent. But the shock of it, I couldn’t move, and for a brief moment it was really rather comfortable and warm down there. Eventually I stood up and brushed myself down muttering an apology. But his and the other passengers faces neither smiled nor frowned. Oh, the humiliation of it, the cruelty of it, embarrassment multiplied a trillion times by the po-faces. I would have cried. But I smiled instead. The best jokes are at our own expense aren’t they? The best humour sparked by our own foolishness. The biggest laughs prompted by own absurd behaviour. Our own misery is the funniest thing sometimes. It can lift the spirits.
It was a recent interview I did with the guru of happiness, Professor Martin Seligman, that prompted me thinking about all of this. That and an email from Professor Richard Layard, the happiness Tsar, in which he wrote that David Cameron’s well-being survey was to be published imminently and perhaps I might like to report on the results. I was overcome by a dreadful gloom.
Afterwards striding along back passages at the House of Commons with a colleague on our way to some summer party I contemplated the well-being debate. Lost, we whisked up flights of stairs and down again, moved along dark corridors reaching one locked door after another. I struck up conversation to pass the time.
“It’s a load of old baloney, isn’t this happiness thingy. Why should we all want to be happy all of the time?”
My companion pulled up abruptly. “Why? Why? Because it’s the key to a healthier economy and increased production,” he said, “There is research, you know, which shows it.”
I immediately agreed with him. Perhaps investing in our national mood is worth it, because we are worth it and it brings in big returns on the investment. But I have a few nagging doubts about the survey. I can’t understand how measuring well-being (all those numbers and graphs and long words and complicated syntax, not easy to absorb unless you have a degree in psychology) might be of use. A survey is a survey, it’s hardly a cure. What if we discover that we’re pretty downbeat, that we have an impressive bad-being rate? That wouldn’t do much for our collective mental state, or maybe it would. And if, when we’re happier, our economy improves why doesn’t the Government take the short cut and put Prozac in the water. It’s a thought. Would lobotomies have the desired effect? We could drift around in a vague haze of nothingness and become benignly highly productive. Oh, it’s all so confusing.
Earlier in the week I had enjoyed a lecture presented by Dr Martin Seligman in one of the commons committee rooms. Fourteen I think. He bounced off the walls telling the packed room that he wasn’t, actually, that much interested in happiness anymore nor well-being for that matter. It was now about “Flourishing”. That’s it, flourishing. We must flourish and this can be “learned.” I won’t bore you with the technical detail he put up on his projector. But the general overall point was that it is worth flourishing and worth pursuing. I wondered how I might learn the tools to do this. One clue might be found in the book A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor. He writes about a French monastery in which he is staying. At first he describes his misery of being trapped in his monk cell but slowly his mood improves.
The desire for talk, movement and nervous expression that I had transported from Paris found, in this silent place, no response or foil, evoked no single echo: after miserably gesticulating for a while in a vacuum, it languished and finally died for lack of any stimulus or nourishment.
And without the stimulus came an “energy and limpid freshness”.
That is a state of mind worth pursuing isn’t it? That is flourishing. It reminded me of an article I had read about happiness in which the author had brought to the reader’s attention a paragraph from The Lord of the Flies, when Henry, one of the characters, wanders to the water’s edge and sees small “transparencies” swimming around in the water.
This was fascinating to Henry. He poked about with a bit of stick, that itself was wave-worn and whitened and a vagrant, and tried to control the motions of the scavengers . . . He became absorbed beyond mere happiness as he felt himself exercising control over living things.
I recognise this. It’s the beauty of happiness, it happens by accident. It happens when we aren’t thinking about it at all, when we’re distracted, when we’re forgetful, when we live in cloud cuckoo land, when we’re absorbed in something else. We cannot force it. When you force it, it ends in tears. Happiness is an ideal which should be approached and captured by indirect methods, as though you are looking at something out of the corner of your eye. If you want to look at the sun observe its reflection in a puddle.
Recently I was in a bit of a mood when my children shouted at me to come and have a look at something “AmaZing”. I found them in the kitchen bent double over a black line of ants marching diagonally across the tiled floor. They began to count them, “We can’t keep track,” they wailed and started over. I began to wonder why the ants were travelling in single file, rather than a crowd, where were they going? Ahh, they were disappearing behind the cooker. I was occupied, engrossed, wondering whether it was possible for a creature so small to think, were their brains bigger than mine relatively speaking. I hardly noticed my small girls boiling the kettle and carefully pouring the steaming liquid on top of the black busy specs.
“What on earth are you doing girls? I thought you were pacifists,” I cried.
“Oh NO, not about ants, mummy we must kill them,” this made me laugh. “It’s unfortunate but a necessity,” my youngest said. She burst into evil giggles and I laughed some more, my bad mood long gone.
So it might be interesting to take a look at the well-being survey. And after digesting it, remember, so I am told, that we don’t laugh because we are happy, but are happy because we laugh. And sometimes ants are all it takes. Or falling over on a bus.
Sadly we don’t experience such delights on the 38, 19 or 73, where chip-throwing and fatal stabbings are the usual transgressions.
I’ve always been impressed by the observation that happiness is a byproduct of activity. I looked it up on Google and it’s attributed to both Aldous Huxley and Eleanor Roosevelt. They would know – I imagine between them they explored pretty much every other avenue.
However, whilst I’m sure you, Eleanor and Aldous are right as to how any individual might be made happy in the course of a day, I do think that the propensity to be happy is temperamental rather than situational. If you’re a generally happy person you’ll probably end up being generally happy in most circumstances. And vice versa: a miserable lottery winner will remain miserable.
Anyhow, thanks for the lovely post – a contribution to happiness in itself.
As a perpetually happy person, I can confirm that the secret to happiness is a total lack of foresight
Happiness is…dabbling, outwith the M25, watching Piers Morgan slowly sink beneath Grimpen Mire, BBC & C4 news in the Old Bailey dock, and stuff like that.
Worm hits the nail, are those who ponder longer ever going to smile, happily no, Think ye not comrades, therein lies gloom, gloom I say.
Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift that I posses
I thank the Lord I’ve been blessed
With more than my share of happiness
To me this old world is a wonderful place
And I’m just about the luckiest human in the whole human race
I’ve got no silver and I’ve got no gold
Just a whole lot of happiness in my soul
Not however as great as the ability to screw the IRS.
Now that is happiness.
You know, if Layard had gone after making life meaningful, rather than chasing that silly word happiness around the park, then I might have had some time for him. As it is, I think this is all going to end in tears on a grand scale.
It’s going into schools in some places – Anthony Seldon’s Wellington College for instance. It makes me fear for some of those kids – when things inevitably go wrong for them later in life, and their difficulties are compounded by an uneasy sense that they shouldn’t be feeling so bad right now because there are ways to stop feeling bad, aren’t there? We did it at school…
I don’t deny that some of the techniques taught in the lessons might be effective buffers against the worst forms of self-hatred etc., but people often remember their schooling in such vague, outliney ways. And attitudes and beliefs about things – and this is surely one – are set into cultural rock. People will assume they have been taught what they believed all along. Or new information will be submerged into old ideas. Even if Layard’s happiness lessons are at Solomon level, people are still going to go away with the idea that they’ve been told to keep smiling through, wear the mask, not be authentic with others, not be themselves, not bother others with their problems.
Frankly, the Buddhist approach to this subject – that negative feelings and emotions are as inevitable as the weather and the idea is to learn how to ride with them, not minimise them, strikes me as the path to go down. For one thing, it’s much more British. We’re a coping nation, not an ameliorating one.
What about grim satisfaction?
Re: Worm’s ‘total lack of foresight’ observation, I actually find happiness in constructing plans and ticking things off lists as I work through them. That and booze in good company.
In fact, Dr Johnson said that, because man is always waiting or working to acheive happiness, he never actually is truly happy… ‘but when he is drunk’. Should the Government therefore be encouraging binge-drinking?
but what happens when you fail to tick a thing off on your list?
Complete mental collapse and, sometimes, a bloody rampage.
When Beethoven got on his Bonn bike and went to Vienna his music, he thought, should give the listener the same feelings as alcohol and laughed aloud when in fact the audience cried, which was often. Sooo…the true meaning of Beethoven’s fifth, ninth, seventh, (another one) Für Elise….?
What made Beethoven laugh was Haydn’s attempts at teaching him composition. What made Haydn laugh was counting the zloti. The zloti never laughed.
Like mercury and infinity Becky, the state of happiness seems, to me, to be almost impossible to grasp – and the more I think about the horrors out there, the more I feel that the only truly happy people are new-born babies, or perhaps the members of those tribes in the deepest Amazon, who have lived in the same way for a thousand years or more. A bleak worldview I know.
I am briefly ‘happy’ when I mend something, or build something from scratch. Without really knowing how to, I made a bird-house and a bird-table a few weeks ago, and because they turned-out well, more by luck than by judgement, I felt good about it and, well, happy.
But years ago in business, I had been particularly successful in making a big sale, and it pleased me hardly at all.
I think we all pass through periods of happiness but it fails to register at the time: later on, we can extract pleasure simply by casting our mind back.
‘Make thy claim on wages a zero then, for zero divided by any number is infinity”… that’s what Thomas Carlyle said in Sartor Resartus, before he was accused of being a Nazi, back when George Eliot, Dickens and Ralph Waldo Emerson all thought he was mega-awesome. In effect, since he was a miserable bugger by nature he was arguing that we should reduce all expectation of life to nothing, and then if even something mildly OK happens, great joy will result. Easier said than done, and I doubt it works as well as all that myself, but reducing expectations seems very Scottish- definitely unsurprising coming from a Calvinist lad from Ecclefechan, anyway.
The notion of happiness lessons makes me shudder, a soft totalitarian fantasy of over reaching government, spawned in a confused and confusing post ideological age, in which those in power are always seeking the next (bollocks) idea with which to ‘elevate’ the unwashed masses. Is William Hague happier than your average punter, whoever he or she may be? I neither know nor care.
As for me, like Mahlerman, moments of triumph that should have brought joy have left me cold or even anxious; tiny, incidental, humble moments on the other hand have left strong impressions of well being. Other events have become “happier” through recollecting them later. Much of it totally unpredictable. Make thy claim on wages a zero indeed; at least you’ll be surprised.
“The throng of petty troubles pains us more than the violence of a single one, however great it may be.” –Montaigne
As per Maherlman & DanielK the reverse is true, petty pleasures lift the spirits.
Forgetting oneself in witty banter over a few drinks. Then it gets competitive and you drink too much and have a punch-up 🙂
A good fight can also be intensely pleasurable, at least if you’re that way inclined. They’re almost always enjoyable to watch if you aren’t. Perhaps the government should encourage street corner fights for the delight & edification of the masses.
That’ll be why every (spurious IMHO) happiness survey peaks in 1976. World of Sport wrestling..
My companion pulled up abruptly. “Why? Why? Because it’s the key to a healthier economy and increased production.”
Wrong.
We’re busy doing nothing,
Working the whole day through
Trying to find lots of things
Not to do.
We’re bust doing nothing
Isn’t it just a crime?
We’d like to be Un-happy but
We never do find the time.
Listening to the radio this morning, it struck me that people who are under the impression that they have a lot of ‘rights’ are invariably miserable.
The subject of Becky’s post is of some not inconsiderable importance in that it raises once again the spectre of, lets call it them. At first it was assumed that we by identifying them were becoming paranoiac and that is of course possible. No it’s not, it’s our self defence mechanism kicking in. There exists today an ever growing gobbit of them drawn almost exclusively from those taxpayer funded corners of society, political sideliners, politics, academia, the state funded media, local government and the medical trades. Other, non taxpayer funded types sticking in their oar to a lesser degree.
Let’s do some spade naming and allocate them a title…parasites with access to the public will do nicely, we shall go further and play their game, pwap’s for short.
Pwap numbers have been on the increase since the nineteen eighties and increasingly so since the years of the psychopathic Blair-Brown tenure, to such an extent that we cannot arise in the morning or slumber at night without their accompaniment.
We, those outwith the pwaps are informed that we are…religious fools, godless morons, racist, homophobic, destroying the planet, the galaxy maybe even the universe, we are illiterate, obese, should (or should not, fill in as appropriate) drink milk, alcohol, tap water, bottled water, rainwater or water out of the font, nor should we eat meat, dairy produce, fish, fowl, Mars bars or chips. The list is endless and added to by the hour. This rubbish is then handed out, parrot fashion by (you fill in by who) or imparted directly by the perpetrators, usually with a smug expression or two.
We, the non pwap’s, the target audience as it were live in a democracy with free speech kinda at it’s core, so why don’t you all just shut up, and do the bidding of these good folks, the pwap’s.
Because we, despite the best efforts of them have the ability to think for ourselves, two plus two makes four, not twelve gallons as the pwap’s would have us believe.
Non pwap’s of the world unite, ignore the bastard’s.
I’m with you in spirit Malty, even though the acronym brings to mind Jonathan Ross.
The pwaps over here have lately floated the idea of banning smoking in cars … will no doubt use more of our underused police resources.
It might be better to be sad if what makes you happy is doing something bad. Like really bad. Might be happy but dead or in prison.
I like worms comment, happiness is a “total lack of foresight”