Richard Layard starts his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2011), with this observation: “There is a paradox at the heart of our lives. Most people want income and strive for it. Yet as Western societies have got richer, their people become no happier.”
I’m currently studying for a Masters in Fine Art at Aberystwyth University. I am doing this for a very straightforward reason: because it makes me happy. I have no interest in adding the qualification to my CV, in marking schemes, in career paths. I’m not seeing it as having utility.
And this fact is strangely difficult to face up to. It seems we are expected to do what we do in order to get or progress to other things. Our discourse is usually purposive, intentional, deliberate: we reify plans as if no good thing ever happened without a Gantt chart and a business model. And, as part of this, we seem to see happiness as something that can be achieved, worked towards – the “pursuit of happiness” – as if it were an end point, rather than perhaps a state of mind.
This, I think misguided, conceptualisation of happiness may be an important aspect of the developed world’s problematic economic system. It is taken as a given that economic growth is good. Such growth requires that each of us consumes just a bit more every year, which creates obvious challenges in an overheating and bounded planet. To get us to do that – to buy more plastic, more textiles, more food, more drink, more travel miles – requires that we believe something that is not true. We have to believe the founding myth of consumerism, which is that consuming more makes you happy. It doesn’t. We are weighed down, literally and figuratively, by possessions, by unnecessary calories, by the expectation that we will provide ever more expensive knick-knacks for our kids.
Even money does not make us happy. Though people with no money are less happy than those with enough to satisfy their basic needs (food, shelter and so on), the correlation stops there. Once your basic costs are covered, money has no further direct impact on your happiness. After this point, your wealth is connected to your happiness only in relation to other people. People who are fabulously rich, but who live amongst others who are even more fabulously rich, are unhappier than them. People who are poor, but less poor than their neighbours, are happier. In these conditions, money ceases to be about the ability to acquire and becomes a score card, a metric of success, a simplistic token of your self-esteem. If you find this is the cause of your unhappiness, you would be better to change your metric or change your friends. Don’t forget, there can only ever be one person in the world who is richer than everyone else.
People will say that different things make different people happy. That may be true, but there is good evidence of what generates greater wellbeing, which is the foundation for happiness, in each of us. Simply put, if you pay attention to each of these five factors, easily memorable in the acronym GREAT, you will increase your wellbeing and thereby your happiness.
Give: those of us who set out to serve other people live longer, healthier and happier lives.
Relate: we are social creatures who want to love and be loved. Strong relationships make us feel fulfilled.
Exercise: we are just animals. Our bodies evolved to be in continual use. If we live sedentary lives, our systems get clogged up and we feel sluggish and morose.
Appreciate: most things, most of the time, are not awful. The news is full of terrible stuff because it is so rare. If we take time to notice and celebrate even the smallest of small things around us, we will smile more – and smiling makes you healthier.
Teach yourself: the world is a toy box of possible learning, brilliant extraordinary learning to be had and relished. Those who stay curious, interested and intrigued live longest and happiest.
In my view, it is unwise to outsource your happiness, to think of it as an end point, to try to buy it in. Happiness is something to be lived – by being curious, loving, celebratory, vigorous,
Peter Gelf 