Happiness

One of the latest wheezes that the Left have got onto is the old truth that money does not buy you happiness.  There have now been various “studies”  proving that.  The Leftist conclusion of course is that therefore we should take people’s money off them since it does not make them happy.

There are various replies to that and I intend one day to write a substantial article on it but here are a few preliminary notes.  I start with what I think DOES make people happy:-

I am quite convinced that the secret of happiness lies in being content with what you have got.  Always wanting more than you have is a highroad to unhappiness.  The Buddhists say that happiness lies in matching up your realities to your expectations and that the easiest thing to change to achieve the required harmony is your expectations.  I agree with that.  For most people it will be easier said than done, however.

A related factor is the importance of a positive attitude.  I read Norman Vincent Peale (“The power of positive thinking”) on that subject in my teens and was rather impressed by it but the two anecdotes that typify it best for me concern Joe Grubb and Bill Gates.

Joe was my usual carpenter in Brisbane when I was doing a lot of house renovations in the 80s and 90s and is naturally a very cheerful and positive person.  He is a Cockney so those who know Cockneys will know what I mean.  Something Joe Grubb once said to me will always illustrate in my mind the central importance of a positive attitude.  It showed to me that it is often not objective circumstances that matter but rather how we react to them: I had remarked to Joe that it looked as if he had just got himself a new set of saw stools (or “saw horses” as some call them).

So he told me how that came about.  He said that just recently he had been working on another job and had been lifting a large timber beam when he lost his grip on it.  The beam fell and, as it fell, smashed into his saw stools and broke them both.  Joe told this as a great joke!  He even saw it as a good thing: “I needed new stools anyway”.  Joe’s cheerful attitude had transformed what might have been seen as a disaster into something to laugh about!  I think we could all do with a lot of that sort of attitude.

In his book “The road ahead” Bill Gates has a similar story.  He mentions that at Microsoft they have as many staff helping people with phone queries about Microsoft software as they have people actually writing the software.  This could be seen as a big waste, as a terrible cost and as vastly inefficient etc but what does Bill Gates say next after relating that?  He says: “That is wonderful”.  Why?  Because Microsoft logs all the queries received and the queries logged are used to help them to improve future versions of the software!  He sees customer complaints and queries as people giving his staff free assistance in designing better products!  He is dead right of course but it takes a big man to see it that way.  Very few other businessmen would.  Since Bill Gates’s attitudes were an integral part of making him the richest man in the world, there is surely some case for thinking that we might have something to learn from them.

A positive attitude can of course be overdone and science after all largely exemplifies the power of negative thinking (or at least critical thinking) but particularly in one’s interpersonal relationships, positive thinking is at least one highroad to happiness.

Another key to happiness lies in the old Latin advice: ‘carpe diem’ (seize the day).  I once had a dream in which I was talking to my son at the end of my life.  I said to him in the dream: “My life has vanished like a dream”.  Life does.  The older you get the faster time seems to go.  Young people generally seem to feel that they are invulnerable and immortal but both are very silly delusions.  Before you know it your time will be up.  So use your available time positively.  Don’t spend time wallowing in any sort of negativity.  Move on promptly from any setback.  Do as soon as you can whatever you want to do or one day it may be too late and all you will be able to do is regret that you did not act when you could have.

That does not mean that you have to be frantically active at all times.  I personally very much enjoy a siesta every afternoon.  That is pretty inactive!  I do believe however that one should always make sure that one has a good dinner.  There are only so many dinners to have in life and there are too few to waste on eating something that you do not enjoy.

I also think that being too fussy about anything is a great folly.  Lots of women in later life seem to get to the point of giving up on relationships or at least contemplating that.  They believe that they know what they want but do not get it so give up on meeting someone who is up to their standards.  I personally have never felt like that because I do not have rigid standards.  I have mostly just taken the best I could get at the time and enjoyed it!  It is probably a rather grasshopperish attitude in many ways but the results (perhaps only to my Pollyanna-ish mind) have been great!

One of the dummo academics   who makes a big fuss over the fact that getting richer does not necessarily make you happier is Richard Layard. Any observer of Hollywood knew that long ago and I guess people have in fact known it for about 4,000 years. In 1 Timothy 6:10 St. Paul probably went a bit too far in saying that “The love of money is the root of all evil” but you get the idea. And the whole story of Job in the OT runs along similar lines. But these days, “If money does not make you happier, then take it away!” is the reasoning. So that old bit of wisdom has found a new use as the latest pathetic excuse to hike taxes.

But I think it is clear that happiness is mainly a disposition.  I am a positive thinker not because I have read Peale but because that it is how I am anyway.  Happiness is fairly fixed and soon (sometimes within minutes) reverts to its accustomed level after any ups and downs.  Some people are happy in circumstances that other would hate.  I know. I have observed perfectly cheerful people among the street-sleepers of Bombay. Some people are almost always happy.  Some people are almost always whining. Some people just have happy natures and some do not. So looking at whether something makes people happy is largely futile. In statisticians’ terms, you are looking for variance in something that is invariant.  Or, putting it another way, correlations with something that is invariant will NECESSARILY be zero.  So if you are interested in running a public policy that respects other people, you need to look at what they CHOOSE, not what makes them happy.  And most people choose more money rather than less.

It is true that certain categories of people report being happier than others—e.g. married people—but that probably just shows that happier people are easier to live with.

Another interesting indication that degree of happiness is a fairly lasting disposition rather than something that is affected by how much money you have is this: “Most people who live with serious disability or illness, such as kidney failure, appear to adapt well and maintain a healthy outlook on life, new research reports.  This trend may be surprising to some—the report also found that people without serious illnesses tended to underestimate the level of happiness in these patients.  “We think it is encouraging that for at least some illnesses, life seems to (eventually) go on and that people come to experience good and even normal mood levels,” study author Dr. Jason Riis of Princeton University in New Jersey told Reuters Health.  “We cannot adapt to anything. But we are generally more resilient than we think,” he said.  In the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Riis and his colleagues note that this is not the first study to show that people can adjust to good and bad life events.  For instance, a nearly 30-year old study found that paraplegics were not that much less happy than lottery winners.”

But money is probably importtant in a negative sense:  It removes many things that stress people.  That is how I understand this study: “Two studies released yesterday shed new light on the importance of economic circumstances, and undermine earlier findings that poor people are just as happy as the rich. Money doesn’t buy Happiness - or Does It?  by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at Melbourne University, shows that when wealth - not just income - is measured, the rich are indeed happier than the poor.  Earlier research that focused only on income found very little difference in the reported happiness of high-income and low-income people. Mark Wooden, the study’s co-author, said: “This has led some people to say money is not that important, relative to other things.” However, when people’s assets were taken into account - the value of their houses, cars, art works, even stamp collection - a different picture emerged.”

There is much more to be said about all this, of course—including mention of Bentall, who thinks that happiness is a psychiatric disorder!—but I think I will have to leave the rest for another day.

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, June 17, 2005 at 07:07 AM in No particular place to go
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