Why aren’t we happy? I know: this large and intractable problem has been extensively addressed by rather finer minds than ours, but it is pleasing to record that it is not beyond the scope of the Commission on Sustainable Development in the South East, which held its first meeting last Friday.
This body, described as a top-level group of planners, politicians and academics, has the job of asking whether the push for economic growth in London (now defined as the bottom half of England) has been at the expense of the happiness of the people living there.
Among the issues which this eminent group will be discussing is: “Do policy makers worry too much about gross domestic product (national income) as a measure of success, and should they rethink what is meant by quality of life?” This is one of those queries that invites the answer “Yes”.
What the commission seems to be asking itself is whether money can buy happiness. And as anyone who read the right sort of fairy stories as a child can tell you, it most certainly can’t — which isn’t to say that being poor has much going for it either.
In short, when it comes to the commission’s brief, to ask whether the rat race in the southeast — stress, overcrowding, long hours and over-reliance on cars — is worth the higher wages, we can spare it the trouble of any further deliberations. It almost certainly isn’t.
The same moral could be drawn from a study earlier last week of the views of 1,000 young professionals by an organisation called Common Purpose. It found that eight out of 10 people aged between 25 and 35 suffer from what the survey called the quarter life crisis.
Nearly 90% wanted careers that would give purpose to their lives, but for most, their present job didn’t do it. And the ones who worked in management and public relations felt especially trapped. No surprises there, then. And these are people whose sense of cosmic disgruntlement has not yet been aggravated by physical decay — no doubt they will feel even worse when they get bald and wrinkly.
As it happens, there were other reports last week that shed some light on the reasons for our discontent. A study of the data from the 2001 census by Sheffield University attracted attention chiefly for concluding that the north-south divide, like the rich-poor divide, has never been greater.
But tucked away in the same report is a further analysis of our lives. One change over the past decade is the drop in the number of households chiefly composed of married couples with children — now less than 30% of the total. Another is in the number of people living alone: 3.5m people under pensionable age live by themselves.
This is a statistic that is extraordinarily redolent of unhappiness. Of course, there are some people who are suited to the solitary life. Most of us are not. I know a couple of score of that 3.5m — all women who are single but who don’t want to be single. They are attractive, intelligent and heterosexual — and inexplicably unmarried.
As a phenomenon there has been nothing like it since the first world war wiped out an entire generation of young men, leaving the women who would have married them to become maiden aunts. But at least war is an explicable reason for being single. If there has to be any audit of the costs and benefits of living now, we have to throw into the debit side the fact that we’re less likely to get married.
A study published last week by Demos, the Labour-friendly think tank, draws the same conclusion. It suggests that more than 2m elderly people will be living alone without family and friends by the end of the next decade. Demos calls it the lonely generation. It is, the authors remark, a consequence of increased divorce, the spread of childlessness and the prevalence of working women. “Working women,” say the authors, Helen McCarthy and Gillian Thomas, “may have less time for these bonding activities, leading to greater family fragmentation.” Well, you don’t say.
The same conclusion occurred to me rather earlier than to the Demos authors when I read Germaine Greer’s last overview of the condition of her sex, The Whole Woman, published in 1999. Just try reading The Whole Woman and then, immediately afterwards, Greer’s seminal work of feminism, The Female Eunuch (1970). It is infused with the urgent priority of the women’s movement then to get clear of the shackles of family.
There are a number of shocking elements to The Female Eunuch as you read it now — not least the splendidly anachronistic class war element — but for most contemporary women the bit that repels is the author’s urgent call to women to be ready to abandon the home to find themselves — not just their husbands, mark you, but their children. Lots of women did. And where are they now? The Whole Woman tells you that the problem now is not patriarchy, it’s loneliness.
The women who have discarded family, terminated pregnancies, divorced, or never married in order to be free are not always whole — lots of them are sad.
The problem for many young women who succeed them is not that they can’t get out of relationships with men — it’s that they can’t get into them. Men’s flight from marriage and women’s forced influx into the workplace even when, as surveys show, they might prefer to stay at home and rear their children, is a loss to both sexes.
There is, of course, only a limited amount that the government can do to change how we behave. But in so far as the government can interfere to persuade women out of the home, it has done so.
I’m not just talking about its unwillingness to give any preferential tax treatment to married couples. I’m talking about its systematic attempts to get mothers into the paid workplace. The state does not even pretend to be neutral about whether parents should look after their children themselves or delegate the job to other people. It is actively discriminating against parents who do rear their children and who are excluded from the tax credits that Gordon Brown lately introduced for nannies.
The trade-off between prosperity and childlessness was more bleakly brought home last week by a poignant little study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on attitudes to abortion on the part of rich and poor. Working from a slender sample of 100 girls, it concluded that middle-class teenagers are more likely to have abortions than poorer girls, who see a baby as something that will make their lives better rather than diminishing their chances of education and employment.
Four years ago it similarly reported that among the poor, abortion has a greater stigma than among the middle classes. These young women might have got some things wrong but they seem to me to have got their priorities right.
Rich and often childless. Prosperous and lonely. And likely to live a long, long time. That’s us. When it comes to solving the problem of why we aren’t happy, it strikes me that the Commission on Sustainable Development in the South East has its work cut out.
Minette Marrin is away
