A friend of mine once lived with a man who changed his name by deed poll to `Yes!’ He figured the optimism of the word would rub off on anyone who said his name, and thus rub off on him. Sadly, before changing his name, in a deep depression and another external attempt at ingratiating himself to the world, he had a tattoo done on his bicep. It read `Born to Lose’. As Yes! was discovering, the pursuit of happiness is an arduous journey. And these days, it’s often crowded with self-appointed experts pushing their own brand of personal contentment. Finding your inner peace is tricky if you’re being tugged in several different directions at once.
Dr Russell Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, believes modern ideas about happiness are making us miserable. “Most people define happiness as `feeling good’,” he says. “If that were the case then you would expect drug addicts to be the happiest people on earth. But the more your life is focused on feeling good, the more you are going to struggle with reality.”
At a rotunda in Brisbane’s historic New Farm Park, members of a Laughing Club are gathering for their monthly dose of therapeutic chuckling. Clasping their hands over their sternum, it begins. “Ha, ha, ha, ha,” is the chant, which eventually spills into laughing. Down by the river, another group does tai chi while fathers jog with strollers. As I walk around the park, watching children play hide-and-seek inside a banyan tree, I wonder – is there a lack of happiness in the modern world, or do we just have more time to contemplate it?
At the Happiness Institute in Sydney, Dr Timothy Sharp puts his money on the latter. “I don’t think we are more depressed. We are just more aware of it. Two to three decades ago, a lot of people suffered in silence, many of whom self-medicated: men with alcohol and women with valium.” The drugs may be more sophisticated today, but the side effects are just as detrimental to our long-term happiness, says Dr Sharp. “There is good argument for people being over-diagnosed and normal emotions being over-pathologised,” he says.
Going a step further, Dr Harris believes pharmaceutical companies have a “vested interest in perpetuating the happiness trap”. Rather than getting his patients to battle it out with their negative feelings and replace them with positive feelings, Dr Harris uses `acceptance and commitment therapy’ (ACT). Based on the concept that our minds have evolved to think negatively in order to be aware of danger, ACT encourages patients to allow bad thoughts to come and go. “The key is not to be swallowed by them,” says Dr Harris.
At Dr Sharp’s Happiness Institute, clinicians offer workshops and seminars based on the idea of `positive psychology’. “If I had to describe the typical client, I’d say they are reasonably well off, married and have families,” says Dr Sharp. “Many come to the institute and say `I thought I’d be happy but I’m not.’ People are coming to us and saying: `Is this all there is?”‘ Like many people in the happiness business, Dr Sharp likes his catchphrases. As a psychologist, public speaker and bestselling author of The Happiness Handbook, he sees his role as enhancing happiness and “teaching people to play above the line.”
‘Positive psychology’ emerged from within the therapy industry, spurred on by a landmark 2002 book Authentic Happiness by US psychologist Martin Seligman. While the book is about feeling good, only the last 10 or so pages touch on finding meaning, says Dr Harris. “There is a term many clinicians use -`experiential avoidance’,” he says. “The more you try and avoid sadness the more you risk an addiction.”
And so, it’s these quick bites of gratification – cigarettes, junk food, shopping, sex, drugs and so forth – that may perpetuate the illusion that everyone out there (except you) is happy. In a society where happiness is often incorrectly defined as `satisfaction’, our happiness and our economy depends on us being made to feel unhappy and inadequate. As the old bumper sticker goes `I’m looking for meaning in my life but all I find is shopping.’
But according to Sydney writer Cassandra Wilkinson (author of Don’t Panic! Nearly Everything is Better Than You Think), the idea that modern society is sapping the joy out of us is, well, sad. “A phoney crisis of national happiness is being manufactured to `prove’ that economic liberalism causes depression, divorce, child abuse, environmental chaos, terrorism and bad manners,” she says, adding that her happiness relies on her fundamental right to choose what she does or does not consume. Intellectuals and elites spent centuries resisting giving ordinary citizens the vote,” she says. “Now they want to restrict the enfranchisement that we experience in the modern capitalist economy.”
Happiness is not a new idea. The word itself is thought to come from the Middle English hap meaning chance -`good feelings’ happened by luck. In 1776, the founding fathers of the United States enshrined happiness in their Declaration of Independence: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But they did not mean to legitimise hedonism.
The idea that consumerism is the key to freedom and happiness is a modern one. With it comes the bleak possibility that our peace and prosperity trades on people we never see, whose human or environmental resources are being tapped on our behalf. If this were the case, happiness would be universally unsustainable.
In a sense, therapy and consumption serve similar purposes: both hold out the promise of an ideal self. And while happiness is a serious business, Dr Sharp is the first to admit that abundance will not lead to happiness. “We say, `Buy whatever you want, but its effects will be short term,’ which is why the Happiness Institute doesn’t appeal to everyone. We don’t offer a grandiose magical solution, we offer strategies people can apply to their lives to make them happier – but they have to work at it.” So if the promises of the consumer society are false, and having money and consuming do not make us happy, what does? Making money and sitting on it?
A Dutch sociologist, Ruut Veenhoven, believes that money, as the cliché goes, can’t buy happiness – but the process undertaken to get it can. For Veenhoven, the relationship between welfare and wellbeing is a crucial one: “The general opinion is that a welfare state does well in reallocating incomes and that people will therefore live happier in welfare states than in equally affluent nations where Father State is less open-handed.” But, as Veenhoven notes, dependency does not stimulate people to work, and without work, people are less likely to feel valued.
To Noel Pearson, Aboriginal leader and director of the Cape York Institute, this is not a new concept. Making headlines this year and partially instigating the government’s extreme intervention to the running of Aboriginal communities, Pearson released a plan for the future of Aboriginal people called From Hand Out to Hand Up. This coincided with a recent documentary Kanyini in which an Aboriginal elder and songwriter, Bob Randall, tells the camera: “I’m floating with nothing but you’re throwing me a line. It’s called welfare and it is never as good as what I had.” What Randall had – and what many of his people no longer have – is responsibility.
If we had no struggle, how would we recognise achievement? If we knew no sadness, how would we recognise joy? And if a welfare state succeeds in its policy – cutting out uncertainty and guaranteeing a degree of national comfort – then what happens to the evolution of the individual? Challenges, our failures and our ability to solve problems are the very things that Charles Darwin maintained make us human. Could this explanation also extend to the sad malaise of younger generations consistently finding themselves in jobs that aren’t a good match with their intellect?
Waitresses with art degrees, telemarketers with anthropology majors and lateral thinkers who end up as bureaucratic cogs in big companies often find themselves lacking … something. Not work, or an income, but certainly any sense of fulfilment. In simple terms, they aren’t happy. Critics infected with that unshakable disease called nostalgia blame loneliness and troubling suicide statistics on a fast-paced, media-driven world in which we spend more time with technology than each other. Cynics tend to react with name-calling. Hence people expressing doubts about today’s standard of living are whingers, with no idea how lucky they are.
In Sydney, the Happiness Institute focuses on a broad spectrum of emotions. “Happiness is not just having a laugh – but living a meaningful life,” says Dr Sharp. The more meaning you find, the happier you are likely to be. Research shows that happy people live longer, healthier lives and are more likely to become rich than unhappy people living in the same city.
But for all the statistics and the acceptable conventions of what it means to be happy, it is important to remember that happiness can be found in the strangest places. In a hospital ward, perhaps, or in a skyward glimpse of a flock of birds. It can even be found watching an ant battle its way across the footpath with a cornflake in tow. In the same way that we all know that smiling doesn’t necessarily mean you’re having fun, eating doesn’t mean you’re hungry, and drinking doesn’t mean you are thirsty, what we are told will make us happy might just make us sad.
