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LETTER FROM LONDON |
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OVERKILL?
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C'mon now, let's all get happy? Pure balderdash!
By MICHAEL JOHNSON
of TheColumnists.com
I’m no curmudgeon but, really, this business of selling “happiness” is getting out of hand. If you believe the hype of recent months, we can all be happy for a small fee or the price of a couple of books.
The last time I was made aware of happiness for its own sake was 15 years ago when Bob Marley’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” hit the pop charts. At least he was tongue-in-cheek as he chanted “Got no place to lay your head, somebody came and took your bed, don’t worry, be happy.”
But now “positive psychology” and a new branch of economics have started studying happiness, and they offer various and conflicting pathways to a rose-tinted life. One money-minded Philadelphia shrink called Seligman is selling his happiness schemes for a $9.95 monthly payment to access his website.
Feeling a little depressed? Prepare your bank details and go to: www.reflectivehappiness.com
I don’t mean to imply that you have to carry the world’s woes on your shoulders, but a bit of compassion is in order for those less fortunate, even if it lowers your happiness rating by a point or two. Indeed, a steady diet of happiness might become a bit boring, too. As a psychologist friend of mine put it so delicately: “Happiness is like an orgasm. It’s no bloody good if it’s happening all the time.”
Even Time magazine noticed the happiness trend a few weeks ago and devoted nearly an entire issue (47 editorial pages) to its pursuit. Okay, it’s in the Constitution, right after life and liberty, but such focus on it starts to look like symptoms of a sick and selfish society.
Most Americans are slow to pick up on irony so they probably missed the fact that six car bombs went off in Iraq that week and the mop-up of 130,000 dead from the tsunami was just getting under way. But no, from atop the Time-Life Building on Avenue of the Americas in New York, happiness was the story that week. Time’s European edition ran a 14-page boildown of the package in February but even that seemed to me to be about 13 pages too long.
You could feel the Timewriters straining to be balanced when they produced a quote as the kicker for the report: “If we all became lotus-eaters, that would probably be the last generation of human beings. For a species to be successful, it has to be essentially miserable.” Now I am really confused.
It is easy to dismiss this media hype as the misdirected energies of a bunch of hacks--What do THEY know?--but that’s not the end of the story. Nobel Prizewinning economist Daniel Kannemann of Princeton University is at work on a formula to rank governments according to the happiness they deliver to their citizens. In his pilot research with 909 American working women he asks them to record their degree of happiness with 28 kinds of activity each day. Sex comes first, followed by seeing friends and having lunch with colleagues, then watching television alone, shopping with a spouse (spending money), and cooking.
Dr. Kannemann is working with three other U.S. universities to build a structure that can be exported to other countries. Each country can then rank itself on a scale of gross national happiness.
No, this is not an April Fool’s spoof.
Even Britain is catching the happiness bug. A consultant in Oxford teaches laughter as therapy, and just last weekend one of the big newspapers, the Sunday Telegraph, ran a long review of three new books on achieving happiness no matter what is going on in the real world.
A sensible doctor, Anthony Daniels, read the three new books and cautioned that we cannot even agree what happiness really is. We know it is not about money or consumerism--at least not in Britain. He rightly dismisses as “thin philosophy” one author’s view that every human action ought to be directed at producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
And he tosses one book aside with the cracking good comment that reading it was like being cornered by a pub bore who think he has something important to say but hasn’t. “I have rarely read so many pages with so little profit,” he says.
I couldn’t have said it better.
©2005 by Michael Johnson. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column was first posted on March 7, 2005.
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