Is everybody happy? Well, the Danes are. Denmark, according to a new study from Leicester University based on surveys of more than 80,000 people worldwide, is the happiest nation on earth.
The British are not. We rank 41st, well behind Ireland (11th), America (23rd) and even Germany (35th).
Two months ago after holding a well licked finger up to the zeitgeist, David Cameron, the Tory leader, declared: “We have to remember what makes people happy, as well as what makes stock markets rise.”
He added to great acclaim: “It’s time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB — General Well-Being.”
Happiness, or the lack of it, is everywhere. The BBC has run a six-part series, The Happiness Formula. “Positive psychology” lessons are being introduced at Wellington College, the boarding school, and at a number of state schools in Manchester and South Tyneside.
How is happiness to be achieved? Can it really be taught? Does Denmark have the answer? Why, nervous cartoonists aside, are they so cheerful in the land of Hamlet, the dismal Dane? “The main thing is to have a good time and enjoy life,” said Peter Christgau, a retired Danish businessman, contemplating the secret of happiness from his well maintained house on the edge of a wood near Copenhagen.
Maybe, he added, it’s the high taxes and generous welfare system: “Danes have a good work-life balance . . . everyone is very casual and very much down to earth. Even if you’re really successful you drive a small Mini.”
THE hunt for happiness reflects a conundrum that the ancient Greeks scratched their heads over. We know what it is to feel happy, but how do we create happiness? Civilisations throughout history have gone in search of the answer. America’s founders, of course, even put the right to the pursuit of happiness in their Declaration of Independence, although not in the US constitution — they had second thoughts about promising the impossible.
Now publishing has got in on the riddle. After “misery books”, the bestsellers that exploit humankind’s need for a good cry, the hot new genre is the hunt for happiness.
A whole new industry has suddenly sprouted, devoted to examining what makes us happy. Heavyweight academics are busy advising on how to maximise smiles.
No chirpy Dane has yet brought out the Viking Guide to Happiness, but a slew of new British and American titles — The Pursuit of Happiness, The Secrets of Happiness, Stumbling on Happiness, The Happiness Hypothesis — is hitting the shelves just in time for the holidays.
The problem is that they do not necessarily make happy reading. Happiness proves to be too serious to be left to the comedians.
For example: “If we are to agree to reserve the word ‘happiness’ for that class of subjective emotional experiences that are vaguely described as ‘enjoyable’ or ‘pleasurable’, and if we were to promise not to use that same word to indicate the morality of the actions one might take to induce those experiences or to indicate our judgments of the merits of those experiences, we might still wonder whether the happiness one gets from helping a little old lady across the street constitutes a different kind of emotional experience — bigger, better, deeper — than the happiness one gets from eating a slice of banana cream pie.”
That is from Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard. His book is puffed as “ceaselessly entertaining” by Steven Levitt, professor of economics at Chicago University and author of the bestselling Freakonomics (a “big idea” book, last year’s hit genre).
If professors in Boston and Chicago stumble on happiness in realms where lesser mortals grow weary, Gilbert still has a point. If we are going to pursue happiness, we ought to know what we mean by it.
Gilbert namechecks everyone from Socrates to John Lennon in his mind-boggling effort to reach a definition.
In doing so, he hits on one possible reason for all the new happiness books.
As he says, we can now choose to a greater extent than ever how we live our lives — with a wider range of potential jobs, places to live and even sexual partners. So we are more in need of advice — and of happiness guidance — than at any previous point in history. Luckily for all us lost souls, there is no lack of it.
For the more traditionally minded there is Richard Schoch, professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London. In The Secrets of Happiness he talks up the approach of sombre, self-reliant ponderers like the ancient Stoics, fans of simple living who would probably wait for the less expensive paperback version of his slim £15.99 book to come out.
Scornful of the “so-called new science of happiness” — yet happy to write about it — Schoch declares that because we are “deaf to the wisdom of ages, we deny ourselves a chance of finding a happiness that is meaningful”.
He also points out: “Somewhere between Plato and Prozac, happiness stopped being a lofty achievement and became an entitlement.”
Darrin McMahon, a professor at Florida State University, also takes the historical route in The Pursuit of Happiness: A History from the Greeks to the Present. But he has a confession.
“There have been times in cultivating this project,” McMahon writes, “in which hours of drudgery yielded only barren pages and arid drafts, when I was forced to confront the irony that writing a book on happiness might make me miserable.”
The antidote to happiness-angst comes from a more familiar source of good cheer. Noel Edmonds, the television presenter, has written Positively Happy: Cosmic Ways to Change Your Life.
Crinkley Bottom’s top thinker said last week: “We as a species are naturally negative. We used to live in caves and wait to see if there was anything to eat or if we would be eaten . . . My book offers people tips about how to change their mindset so they are more positive.”
He has a gender theory of happiness: “It’s easier for a man to be more consistently positive and therefore happy than a woman, because women — as the main creators of life — worry. They have a powerful maternal instinct which means they can have a consistent negative approach. It is a female quality. More women are on anti-depressants.”
He also warned: “You can’t be happy all the time. If you are, you’ll end up on medication.”
WHAT put happiness at the top of the agenda? Virginia Ironside, the agony aunt, believes happiness books “are becoming popular because people lead such good lives these days (that) there’s nothing that big to worry about”.
She added: “Few people sleep rough, worry about how they will eat or if their child will die. So instead people worry about whether they are happy or not.
“Women used to meet a man, be pleased that he had a job and get married. Now women have so much choice and start thinking about what love means and if they really love someone.”
Alain de Botton, the polymath author, offers other answers — although he says that his latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, “is not a book about happiness, it’s just been mistitled . . . it’s strictly about buildings”. The title alludes to a sentence by the French writer, Stendhal.
“In the last five or 10 years,” said de Botton, “happiness has become a subject that’s been studied by economists and social scientists — previously it was the preserve of philosophers and poets.”
The reason for this, said de Botton, is that levels of happiness were not rising with income. This raised the question of whether we were concentrating too hard on earning money and not enough on living in ways that made us happy.
As a result, economists, psychologists and social scientists have been writing thousands of research papers on what makes us happy and how to measure it. All that work is now breaking surface as books.
Avner Offer, an economist at All Souls, Oxford — whose The Challenge of Affluence was published earlier this year — said: “We see a whole range of disorders which are not compatible with the view that things are getting better and better. I think the main areas are crime, family breakdown and obesity.”
Offer added: “There’s a certain amount of disillusion with economic growth in general — I think the largest expression of unease is actually around climate change.”
Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, said: “The obsession with happiness can probably be explained by our prosperity coupled with our neuroses.
“There is something in philosophy called the ‘paradox of hedonism’, which means the more you concentrate on happiness, the more you worry about happiness, the less likely you are to be happy. The way to be happy is to sneak up on it.”
THE HAPPY RANKING
What makes you happy? Daniel Kahnemann, a psychologist at Princeton University, came up with a ranking after asking 900 women in Texas which activities made them happiest
SEX
Produced the highest happiness quotient of 4.7, but the subjects managed just 12 minutes of it a day on average
FRIENDS
Socialising gave a happiness rating of 4, and the subjects spent 2hr 18min daily at it. Happiness gurus say good relationships are the key to long-term happiness
WATCHING TV
Flopping out in front of the box scores 3.6. On average the subjects watched TV for 2hr 12min a day
LOOKING AFTER KIDS
Caring for children rated 3. Whether this was because or despite of the fact that it lasted on average only 1hr 6min daily was not clear
COMMUTING
Bottom of the rankings, commuting scores a rating of 2.6, even lower than working, yet it consumed an average of 1.6 hours a day
