Happiness

Why modern life doesn’t make us happy

The greatest delusion ever sold to us by modern advertising is not that we need to buy water in bottles or that rocks make good pets. It’s the delusion that we should expect to be happy all the time. This idea certainly would have been news to our ancient ancestors. Over millions of years, they became the dominant hominid on the planet because their brains evolved to be survival machines, not happiness generators. The first peals of laughter around those early campfires were not because everyone was having a good time; laughter evolved as a social bonding signal to communicate to the rest of the tribe: ‘Phew, we’re safe now. Looks

Now I’m 64: my tips for a happy old age

On my 20th birthday, I locked myself in the bathroom of my bungalow in­­ Billericay and cried. Having achieved my dream – becoming a published writer – at the tender age of 17, I thought it was all downhill from there. Yes, some of this had to do with marrying the first man I had sex with; the idea that I was only ever meant to do the deed with him alone appalled me beyond words. But there was also a general feeling that my value was in some way intrinsically bound up with my extreme youth. Fast-forward to the day I turned 60, when I woke up in an

Lumberjacks know the secret of happiness

The results are in and nature (i.e. God) wins again. A Bureau of Labour Statistics survey in the US has found that lumberjacks and farmers are the happiest, least stressed and most fulfilled workers, further proving that everything we need to be joyful and satisfied in this life is not man-made. Nor does it have much, if anything, in common with the prevailing culture. A Washington Post analysis of the survey noted that ‘The most meaningful and happiness-inducing activities were religious and spiritual, followed by ‘the second-happiest activity – sports, exercise and recreation’. I am fond of harping about how a godless society is a miserable one. Ericka Andersen noted in USA

Covid-19 and the problem with ‘happiness’ research

Today is supposedly Blue Monday. Sixteen years ago, a travel agency published a press release claiming that the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year. The idea is superficially plausible. It’s mid-January. It’s cold. You’re skint after Christmas. You’re back at work after the weekend. There are worse candidates for the most miserable day of the year. But as a scientific claim, it was swiftly debunked and the academic responsible for it has since disowned it. It lives on as a way of filling space in newspapers and is probably most famous for being untrue. If it weren’t for the ‘I think you’ll find it’s

Mind the gap: how wide is the North-South divide?

Red light, green light The three tiers of Covid restrictions have been described as a ‘traffic light’ system. — The world’s first traffic light is recorded as having been installed at the Palace of Westminster in 1868 to help MPs and peers enter and leave parliament. Those lights only had red and green phases.— Traffic lights installed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1914 incorporated a buzzer to warn that the lights were about to change. The amber phase was patented by Garrett Augustus Morgan, an African-American inventor, after witnessing an accident. Watford Gap? New lockdown measures have rekindled talk of a north/south divide. Has the gap widened or shrunk over the

My jailhouse diet

Gstaad   It’s written in the Declaration of Independence, so it must be true: the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right. There are those, of course, who try to deny us the pursuit of happiness — we used to call them ball-busters — and they were more often than not wives or girlfriends, ladies who had replaced stern nannies, or even sterner mothers, as we grew older. I’ve had women trying to thwart my pursuit of happiness throughout my life, mostly using the excuse that they’re worried about my health. They don’t seem to get that happiness is more important than health, and that I was never healthier than

High life | 28 March 2019

New York   This place feels funny, a bit like Beirut, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Druze and encamped Palestinians live together but separately, with one or two million Syrian refugees completing the mix. Over here the once-ruling Wasps are now irrelevant, having moved to their country clubs in the suburbs. The Chinese are creeping up, having bought more real estate in Manhattan alone than Islamic State has lost in Syria and Iraq. (I now get nuisance telephone calls in Chinese.) On the bottom of the ladder are the Hispanics and the African-Americans, the former doing all the heavy lifting in the construction business, the latter, sadly, being the majority in

In the land of the Thunder Dragon

This charming collection of individual photographic portraits of Bhutanese citizens intentionally highlights the two central features of the kingdom today: cultural tradition and the encroachment of modernity. The photographer A.J. Heath lived in Bhutan for a year. Over three weekends he set up an open-air studio in the main square of the capital, Thimphu, and invited people in to be snapped. The subjects, mostly young, range from teenagers to a miner and a royal bodyguard. Opposite each picture Heath reproduces the questions he asked his subjects, and how they replied. The conversations reflect the duality I mentioned earlier: Heath asks for example what makes people feel Bhutanese. The landlocked Himalayan

Help over the hump

Losing our way in life’s trackless forest, whither should we turn for solace and advice? Wisdom used to be the special province of our elders, though for no better reason than that old people were less common than they are now. Aristotle had their measure: ‘As they have a lot of experience,’ he wrote, ‘they are sure about nothing, and under-do everything.’ Now the old are as common as grass, and we draw the truth about life experience as much as possible from the source. If you want to know how a child feels, ask a child. If you want a considered opinion about Muslim dress codes, stop opining into

Long life | 29 December 2016

New Year’s Day is the most depressing of holidays. It doesn’t celebrate anyone or anything worth celebrating. It simply marks the passage from one year to the next, something so predictable and uninteresting that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Yet people see it as a great opportunity to start again, to turn over a new leaf, to make times better and happier than before. It’s an odd moment in which to be optimistic, when the winter is deepening and the debts incurred over Christmas are waiting to be paid. But nothing stops millions from greeting this non-event with wine and song and gaiety as the clock strikes midnight. New Year’s Eve

High life | 8 December 2016

Here we go again, my 40th Christmas column in a row, and it seems only two weeks ago that I filed the last one. This is a very happy time of year — parties galore, lots of love for our fellow man and happiness all around. Mind you, there is an old calypso that says: ‘If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife…’. I’m not so sure about that; in my book, the prettier the woman the happier it makes me, but I could be wrong. My instinct tells me that a pretty woman keeps a man on his

The happiness police

On a recent sodden weekend walk, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking: it’s not so bad. Not the slugs or the sky or the rain making its way down a gap between neck and waterproof. But I couldn’t do it. Losing heart, I turned back. Glump, glump, glump through the puddles. It rained through breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. Same the next day. And the day after. I wore grey and sighed at the window. But I am aberrant. Melancholy is against the rules nowadays. I should have put on my yellow wellies, twirled my spotty umbrella, photographed myself in the garden and put it online with the hashtag

Long life | 27 August 2015

We learn from a new report that children in England are among the unhappiest in the world — more unhappy, even, than the children of Ethiopia, Algeria or Israel. Why should this be so? Life is still quite good in England. It is generally peaceful and prosperous. Yet, in the admittedly rather haphazard list of countries surveyed by the Children’s Society and the University of York, the only one in which children were found to be more miserable than here was South Korea. The children of Romania and Colombia were all far happier. The two main reasons offered for this despondency among English children were bullying in schools and worries,

Low life | 11 June 2015

On Sunday morning, I was kicking a football in the back garden with my grandson. I had bought him his first pair of football boots, Optimum Tribals, junior size 11, blue and orange, each boot furnished with six very adult-looking steel studs: four on the sole, two at the back of the heel. We were shirtless. With a football at his feet and his shirt off, my grandson is transformed from an intelligent, biddable boy who is perhaps overly concerned with questions of right and wrong into an arrogant, argumentative liar given to pettish sulks. He tackles like a terrier gone berserk during a rat hunt. It wasn’t long before

Horace still understands happiness better than the LSE

So here comes another book about how to be happy, written by Professor Dolan, an ‘internationally renowned expert’ at the LSE. The key evidently lies in ‘pleasure and purpose’, derived from your ‘daily felt experiences’, an analysis hymned in the introduction by a Nobel prize-winner as a ‘bold and original move’. Really? Since Dolan asserts that happiness derives from your ‘felt experiences’ (or ‘paying attention to the things that make you happy’), he is simply saying that it is a state of mind. Very original. This old hat is a form of 4th century bc Stoicism, which asserted that happiness depended on what went on inside your head, because that

Looking for the meaning of life? Come to Constantine Phipps’ poetic theme park

A favourite game of mine is to imagine Virgil and Homer today, plying their trade among the supermarkets and office blocks. What would they sing? Can modern life aspire to the epic, and can such a form still be understandable, even useful? C.S. Lewis, though he did translate the Aeneid beautifully, didn’t quite manage a similar feat with his bizarre modern epic, Dymer. It’s not a field many wish to enter. And yet Constantine Phipps, in his third book, What You Want, has made not only an epic, but a didactic epic, accessible, relevant and involving. In precise, lucidly flowing iambic pentameters, the poem is a meditation on the nature

Why are Scandinavians so happy when they should be so sad? 

As I sit here in my Sarah Lund Fair Isle sweater, polishing my boxed sets of Borgen and nibbling on a small piece of herring, it briefly occurs to me that perhaps I too have fallen victim to the prevailing mania for all things Scandinavian. Just about the only person who’s stayed resistant, it seems, is Michael Booth, the author of this book. At home in Copenhagen — he’s married to a Dane — watching the incessant drizzle falling through the perpetual twilight, Booth begins to think he’s losing his mind. How come every survey ever commissioned into human happiness puts the Scandinavians at the top of the list?, he

Gyles Brandeth’s diary: The pub where the Queen came in by the fire escape

Hard on the heels of the 90th birthday of Nicholas Parsons (10 October) comes the 65th birthday of the Prince of Wales (14 November). Neither is due for retirement any day soon. Indeed, I suspect retirement would be the death of the long-serving host of Radio 4’s Just A Minute. The Duchess of Cornwall listens to his programme, I know. Perhaps her husband does too. Either way, Parsons is a perfect role model for Prince Charles. Nicholas is young at heart, unfailingly charming and wholly committed to the strange lot that fate has accorded him. He has been hosting Just A Minute for 46 years and not missed a single recording.