Happiness

AJP posting at ML has provoked thought on the subject of happiness.

Dear Mr Humphreys,
In the course of your discussion with A L Kennedy, Toby Young and Julian Fellowes this morning, you suggested that voter turnout had dropped because as an electorate, we were “happier than ever before.” You may have been playing devils advocate or alternatively, this may be your genuine belief. Either way, it is a “fact” which we hear time and again, particularly in relation to falling election turnouts.

I am writing because I am always troubled when this proposition goes unchallenged. There is no evidence that we are happier now than we have ever been. There is a very large body of evidence to suggest that despite high levels of economic growth, people in a number of different industrialised nations are no happier than we were fifty or so years ago. Indeed, some of this evidence suggests that people are less happy. There is a clear link between growing inequality and unhappiness. As far as Britain is concerned, there is little or no evidence that people do not vote because they are “happy.” On the contrary polls reveal again and again that people in this country have very grave anxieties about our society and the wider world. The problem is that they do not believe that politicians will address these concerns and they do not think that their votes will make a difference since the policies of all the main parties are so similar. Furthermore, turnout tends to be lowest amongst poorer sections of the electorate but higher amongst the more wealthy.

In light of all this, I find it rather odd when we are told that we are a happier and more contented society than we have ever been. I have no doubt that the government would like this view propagated as widely as possible, but surely you do not see it as your job to do so?

Yours sincerely,

AJP as usual brings up interesting points. I'm quite bothered as happiness as a concept, a concern that's been developing over time. I don't know what it's objective qualities are (though I'm told these might be related to serotinergic and dopaminergic secretions) even though I've experienced these subjectively. Happiness, I'm told by psychologists and priests, is a quantum under my control, if only I had the cognitive skills, breadth and wisdom. However, that's not what I see in real life, and the happiness offered may not even be something I want.

I'm concerned and intrigued by some of happiness's paradoxical qualities. Happiness as a subjective mood state appears inversely correlated with wealth, westernisation and greed. The more we see and crave what we haven't got, the less we appreciate what we do posses. That's one reason why a life exchange with a poor Thai Buddhist tomorrow would probably not boost me from a present contented state to an ecstatic one. Another reason that a lifeswap might not give me miraculous boost of endorphins is that I've accrued knowledge of others' pain, deprivation and lack of rights, unavailable to most Thai peasants in their happy haze. My experience is that the happiest people I know are the least inquiring and informed. Paradoxically, my least overtly happy friends (demonstrated by their SSRI ingestion) are the most educated and economically privileged.

When working with neurologically disabled kids in the 80s, a staff aphorism held that the extent of parent distress was correlated not with the kid's disability but with parents' level of education. This did seem broadly true, on an anecdotal basis. Is stupidity good for you? And also, once you know of others' suffering, can you ever be happy again?