Comfortable Disorientation

Behind a smile?

photo by VaNnI on flikr

With my current preoccupation with happiness, I haven't failed to notice how many brands are winking and grinning at me these days. I hate to be cynical, but sometimes this Hamlet quote comes, unbidden, to mind:

"That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain!"

I feel wicked posting that. But hey, it's Friday evening and I'm in a caution-to-the-wind mood. Here's to a fabulous bank holiday!

Emotional trends?

Image from Google Trends

I was in a workshop last week where the facilitator stated “as you’re probably aware there’s a massive trend towards happiness”. So a room full of pretty smart people started debating one of my current pet issues.

Various interesting questions were raised and briefly discussed - does a trend like this suggest people are fundamentally unhappy? Is the search for happiness a product of increasing complexity and desire for simplicity? How important is the distinction between momentary short-term pleasure and enduring contentment? Is happiness simply the latest way of justifying what we want to do anyway?

At the time, none of us questioned whether this was indeed a trend in the first place. But thinking about it, the suggestion that happiness is a growing trend seems, well, a bit silly really. I don’t believe that happiness is any more of a driver today than it has been in the past. It only appears to be on the rise because there’s a glut of books on the market and the media are talking about it.

Surely a trend needs more substance than volume of type?

More happiness

Prompted by discovering this Sunday Times article I have been wondering about the need to teach happiness. It seems a paradoxically sad state of affairs.

Perhaps this has arisen because modern life is teaching us not to be happy and we need to restore the balance. I often feel that cynicism gets too much kudos these days. Critical thinking is something we are taught to develop and in this context cynicism is viewed as healthy, smart and desirable. But learning to be cynical makes us devalue emotional and cognitive skills such as optimism, open-mindedness and fantasy - skills which I suspect make us happier.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention, at the end of the article there is a quote from Albert Camus. He is described as a 'goalkeeper turned writer' - I'm tickled by the fact that his past life as a goalkeeper is considered salient but can't deny that it is interesting!

Happiness and relativity

Happiness has been on my radar for a while now. It suddenly seems like everyone is talking about it, studying it or writing about it.

Some are deeply cynical. In particular I've read a couple of articles by Frank Furedi who feels that we are being manipulated to accept that happiness (along its vague and nebulous sister 'wellbeing') is what we want in order to lower our expectations. Here's one of his articles from earlier this year in the Telegraph.

There's also a cluster of new books about happiness vying for attention. I've not got round to reading any yet, but have Happiness: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard on my bookshelf.

A phrase from one article I have read has become lodged in my mind  'the brain senses things in comparison'.  In the context of happiness, this means that we feel happier when we are comparatively better off than those around us.  But I've been keeping it in mind in lots of other contexts too.  It's hardly a startling or revolutionary idea, but a useful sense check - if someone tells me they like or dislike something, I'm immediately looking to understand what it is being compared too.

I think I read about the phrase in a review for Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Glibert.  In any case, this looks like a great book and will soon be on my to-be-read pile.