A new happier direction for the left

I went to a conference on Saturday, hosted by Compass ("New Direction for the Democratric left". I love the use of the word "Democratic", there, just top point out that they are not the Respect party). It was OK. I have had both better and worse Saturdays, the latter mainly in football stadiums in the South East. I saw Ken Livingstone give a speech and he was really good. I mean really good. Totally on top of the detail of his subject, but able to give a broad background sweep, too. Impressed.

There was a series of "breakout" seminars, as there tends to be at these klind of things. One was about A Saner Planet, hosted by MIND, with Richard Layard, of me writing in a previous post about a book he wrote fame, a minister from the DWP whose name escapes me, a Health and Wellbeing journo from the Independent on Sunday and Derek Draper. Derek Draper used to be a political lobbyist, who got caught showing off how much access he had to the early Blair government (though he doesn't really look like this anymore). He's now married to her off GMTV and works as a therapist.

Pen portraits completed, time to think about what it all means. It's the new direction for the Democratic left, but I think most people there agreed that capitalism was A Bad Thing. In our little happiness session, one guy got up and asked the therapists who formed the panel if they weren't just patching people back up to be used in a capitalist system that made them unwell in the first place. Massive applause. And I kind of agree.

But it struck me that this is actually interesting territory for the left, democratic or otherwise. Left wing politics has potential to spread happiness, but never really took it on as a central plank of its identity. Increased happiness is really only a byproduct of their politics, which are as materialist as any on the right. The aim of the left is essentially a more equal society. A more equal society should be a happier one, so hurray! But it's the equality that is the aim, not the happiness. Similarly, if the workers were to wrest the means of production from the capitalist overlords, the increased sense of control would make them happier, so hurray once again! This, though, is merely a serendiptous occurrence - the main aim of seizing the means of production form capitalist overlords is to retain any surplus value created and be a little better off as a result.

The point was always this - given that happiness was never the aim, there was no promise that the gains in happiness that should result from, say, society being more equal, or capitalists less overlording, necessarily would. Or did. For historical proof of that, I think at this point I will say this - the Soviet Union.

So then, the left - should have been on this one ages ago. Instead it looks like a reaction to David Cameron . Ho hum.



God, just look at him.....

Medical happiness

This in the Guardian today, about a GP who says that his fellow medics should get involved in the business of happiness. He talks about techniques of becoming happy, such as focussing on a positive event from the last day, which will automatically improve our mood. Allworthwhile stuff, I'm sure, though some of his suggestions are at the life-coaching end of psychology.

The most interesting point, though, is that he successfully sued his then employers, the local Health Authority, for working him too hard back in the 1980s. As a junior doctor, he regularly worked 80+ hours per week. The Court of Appeal finally ruled in his favour - your employer has a duty of care toward you, and this does not involve working you so hard you could die. I think that this will be his greatest contribution to overall happiness in this country.

The thing about the medical approaches he discsusses in the article is that they are more of a treatment for unhappiness. Overwork, stress, tiredness - they are all causes. One of the reasons I am sceptical about life coachy type solutions is that they do not treat causes. None of the books that will Make You Happy that get advertised on the tube are ever going to tell you to quit your job, or go and retrain as a gardener like you always wanted to. They are always too focussed on a very narrow definition of Success! for You! to recommend something as awesome as that.

There's an interesting parallel, then, with therapy. Does, for instance, CBT, about which there was a lot of excitement about a year ago , treat the causes of unhappiness or simply pick people up once they've become unhappy? Moreover, does it treat lots of individuals' individual symptoms, where there is a larger societal cause at work?

More economics, some more happiness

I have now finished the Layard book, Happiness, Lessons from a New Science. It was a lot less economics-based than I thought it would be. There are some graphs, and a few tables, but no really complicated regression equations, eigen values, r squareds or anything. It's actually very readable - the tone is kindly uncle, somewhere between helpful and patronising (my favourite sentence might well be "The most famous anti depressant is Prozac, which has been taken by millions who suffer from depression, including Princess Diana". No! Actually, I've changed my mind. This is my favourite; "Buddhists, such as the Dalai Lama..". What about Richard Gere?).

The book makes some very imoprtant points, not least that happiness is real and measurable. Scans of the brain show activity in speciific areas (the left hand side in particular) when we are happy. There are reliable questionaires that can help us measure happiness over time and even across countries. The same things - family, finance, community and so on - tend to make people happy. All of which means that happiness cannot be dismissed as an undefinable, wishy washy concept that means unquantifiably many different things to different people. Which is a relief.

A couple of things, then. He frequently repeats two things in the book - firstly, that an additional pound gives more happiness to a poor person than to a rich person. This is fairly standard GCSE economics. Secondly, when it comes to happiness, relative wealth matters more than absolute wealth. If I get a £100 pay rise and you get a £200 pay rise, that makes me unhappy, even though I am by and large quite well adjusted and not running on a cocktail of spite and envy. So, it seems to me that reducing overall inequality via some sort of redistribution would be a valid policy goal. He is never explicit about this, though he does have some kins things to say on redistributive taxation and the potential for taxes to prevent overwork.

Connected but different, is his assertion that money spent on alleviating poverty would be better spent on better mental health. Why should it be one or the other? Poor people are more likely to suffer from mental illness - true across all ages, children , adults and older people - so, wouldn't alleviating poverty reduce the prevalence of mental heatlh problems?

Layard makes a series of policy recommendations (including tackling poverty, though mainly overseas). He steers clear of any redommendations regarding taxes or benefits. I'll do it instead. A more equal society would be a happier one. So we should put up taxes on the highest paid and increase wages and benefits to the poorest. Easy. Next.

Being Boring

One of the easiest ways to be unhappy is to be bored. I noticed this at the weekend. Overall my interest threshold is very low - it takes very little to get and keep my attention - but when I'm bored I'm miserable. I got bored waiting for people to say goodbye to each other at a gig the other night, and had to leave. So I pulled a proper teen strop and stomped outside by myself, just 'cos I was bored. And if you think about it, a long, dull bus journey is as likely to make you unhappy as, say, dropping your sandwich on the floor or losing a fiver. That unhappy.

Tibor Scitovsky was a Hungarian American economist, and he noticed this in the 1970s. He wrote a book called The Joyless Economy about how people could be rich but not happy. Which kind of means I should just read that book and then we can all go home. Anyway, his argument was that we need interesting, novel experiences to keep us happy. Note: not things, not objects, but times and "pleasures", in his words. The reason for this is that we cannot habituate - get bored with - experiences in the same way as we can, and do, with things.

Which makes me think two things. Firstly, shopping is now double bad. Firstly, it's a boring thing to do, as has been proved decisively in a previous missive, but the end product of shopping is stuff , to which we habituate, and won't ultimately make us any happier.

Secondly, having a hobby would sort all of this out, and there aren't enough hobbies for grown ups. I went to an art gallery at the weekend and looked at a boat that was made of old dressing tables. It was great. Sat around the boat were groups of pre-schoolers, making their own boats from old easter egg and cereal boxes. No way was that boring. But if there's no football on, really, what is there for a grown up to do on Saturday afternoon? It's shopping again, isn't it?

The Economics of Happiness

Economics is like all social sciences in that it goes through trends and periods of re-evaluation. The current fashion is Happiness economics, where the central question is: how come, if we are so much richer than we were, we are no happier? Well, quite. Seems to me I should really try and find out more about this.

So, I have just ordered a book about the economics of happiness off Amazon. Oh yeah, I really mean this. It's by the esteemed economist Richard Layard, whom I last saw on Newsnight during the hour-long wring of hands that followed the release of the UNICEF report into the wellbeing of children in rich countries, the one that said that children in the UK were the least happy, most distrusting and among the poorest, relatively speaking .

It's always worth knowing a bit more about esteemed economists before reading their books, so I had a look for a biog, trying not to rely on wikipedia. Turns out he's from the LSE, and did a lot of work on things like the New Deal, and other very NewLabour policies. If I was some razor sharp satirist I would insert a joke in here about him directly causing the unhappiness of others, but I'm not so I won't. Instead, it's worth looking at this article , critiquing the whole concept of happiness, by Daniel Ben-Ami, a guy who has a blog with the exceptional title "Ferraris for all". Ferraris for all is his provocative way of saying the only way you can ensure welfare is through economic growth - the only economic aim should be to grow the economy, and this can be counted in percentage increases in GDP, not measures of happiness.

This second blog is interesting because, firstly, he seems to be rather defensive of the fact that he thinks economic growth is the only thing worth aiming for, as if this were a minority view, and not the way the whole capitalist system were set up. Secondly, and this is a bit off topic, he thinks anti corruption is a bad idea . I thought anti-corruption would be one of those causes everyone would agree on, like anti-murder, or pro-a nice sit down. Huh.

For I am not alone

There is a search feature in blogger that lets you look for phrases occuring on anyone's blog anywhere. Unsurprisingly, I used it to look for myself, by typing in the phrase "Why is everyone so unhappy" into the search bar. I was fourth, which was a bit disappointing, seeing as that is the title of my blog. Turns out it searches the text, not the title, so, maybe fourth is decent enough. A Champions' League spot. And I think Number 1 deserves its spot.

Number 1 is an entry from USpolitics.tribe.net , with the intriguing, if not outright hilarious, title "Park Rangers not allowed to state age of Grand Canyon". I think this is funny because Park Rangers make me think of Yogi Bear, and the headline is reminiscent in tone of something the Daily Mail might say ("Now YOU must learn Urdu!", "PC Brigade forces Diwali on our kids", "You can't even call them midgets any more!"), though different in content.

The story itself is one of those you-couldn't-make-it-up-only-in-America ones. The fact that the Grand Canyon has been around for a few million years is problematic to some who believe the earth to only be 12,000 years or so old, people who apparently have enough purchase within the Bush administration to pressure the National Park Service into denying the Canyon's age. And provenance. Apparently it was formed during Noah's flood, not, for instance, by uplift from the Colorado Plateaus, which steepened the gradient of the Colorado River and its tributaries, increasing their speed and ability to erode, further exacerbated by weather conditions during the Ice Age, increasing the amount of water in the drainage system. Two different views. That's all.

So, Why Are People So Unhappy? In this instance, the phrase crops up during the increasingly heated debate below, where an unsuspecting Christian gets a huge heap of opprobrium dumped on him or her in the name of his/ her fellow believers. This poster wonders why "everyone is so unhappy and only happy when bashing someone who is". In this instance, everyone is unhappy because a many-million year long geological process has been rebranded as an act of God by some underling in the pay of the White House. And it is impossible not to notice that there are a lot of unhappy people online....

A history lesson

Implied but unspoken in the title to the blog are the words "these days". The central hypothesis is that we are unhappy now, and more unhappy than we used to be. So it was interesting to read this article in the Guardian today.

I'm probably not the only person who looks at the mental health of the nation(s) and looks for a recent cause - post industrial decline, consumerism, collapse of the family etc and so on. This article offers some history, going back to the Enlightenment and even earlier. As with the Adam Curtis doc, I love grand sweeping ideas, so I loved much of this article.

We go back to the 16th and 17th Centuries and "an intensification, and a fairly drastic one, of the universal human capacity to face the world as an autonomous "I", separate from, and largely distrustful of, "them"". With this came the sense of isolation and loneliness, and the realisation that "reality has no meaning other than what a person chooses to impart to it". So we see the seeds of existentialism. This led to an epidemic of depression, then given the somehow more comforting name of melancholy, accounting for "one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England".

I'm always looking for a socio, poliical but especailly economic explanation for these things, and was drawn in particular to the author's observation that this increasing sense of indiviualism came as a result of increasing soical mobility. A person's place in life was no longer ordained from birth, and with this opportunity to advance came the concern of how other people perceived you. Mirrors became popular in the homes of the bourgeosie, books were published on how to behave like someone of a higher stature. There were ways to behave, and anxieties about how to do so.

The whole point of the piece was that, in the middle ages, there were dances, festivities, feast and merry meetings which would leave people "refreshed & comforted" and "gladded with instruments of musick". These rituals were religious in nature, designed to please god, but the spread of Calvinism in the 16th and 17th Century changed their nature and threatened their existence. Calvinism is fundametally depressing in any case, full of references to man as a wretched, fallen creature and the usual stuff about damnation. Po faced and austere, it did not accommodate the kind of drunken, loud and hugely fun celebrations that would glad with instruments of musick, and so they died away. With them, argues the author, died the very thing that would help alleviate the increasing mellancholy of the time. And of course we cannot help but see the echoes today, as people get unhappy when they can't get tickets to Glasonbury .

Not filling the void

The Onion is one of the best sites on the internet. For a while at the turn of the decade, it pretty much defined online satire, which was odd, in a way, as it was very traditional in approach, essentially an online weekly newspaper. Except hilarious.

This is a particularly funny story, from 2000, about a wholly useless new consumer product that has not, somehow, managed to "fill the void–a vast, soul-crushing spiritual vacuum Americans of all ages helplessly face on a daily basis, with nowhere to turn and no way to escape".

I thought about this story at the weekend, after I'd spent Saturday afternoon in some of London's finest department stores, hours of my life I will never see again but have taught me something important: I really hate shopping. I used to love it. At school, I would go out at lunchtime to the record shop and never come back empty handed. As a student I would spend my spare time dodging between Brighton's many trainer retailers, often clutching a bag of newly purchased records. Now, though, I download mp3s and only buy new shoes when my old ones have holes. And maybe not even then.

The feeling I got on Saturday was an intense boredom but mainly a disappointment. I kind of wanted to be enjoying myself, buying some jeans (I need some new jeans. I think) or maybe...maybe some mugs. But I liked none of it. The jeans were too dull, too identikit, and the homeware was someone else's aesthetic and I couldn't see why I'd want to fill my flat with it. I have real trouble with the idea that goods, designed by someone else, mass produced by someone else and sold by someone else again should somehow express who I am. For another time, perhaps...

So far, so ranty, and so what. But here's the tenuous link. Shopping is supposed to be one of our comforts. Our lives are busy and stressful and we hate our jobs but! we can go out and buy stuff that's make us feel better when we get it home and, weirdly, the whole process is supposed to be enjoyable in and of itself. Of course it's not, though. Schlepping across rainy streets, dodging crowds, waiting in in queues - all rubbish. I was around Oxford Circus a year or so ago, squeezed up against the crowds, trudging slowly nowhere. There used to be a rather maverick evengelical scouse preacher there, his regular patch, with a megaphone and a frequently repeated catchphrase. He was feeling slightly more discursive that morning. "Turn to the word of Jesus", he said. "You've tried consumerism, and look at you. You're all miserable!". It was impossible to disagree.

So that's the link. Why is everyone so unhappy? Well, at least one of the reasons is that the very things that are supposed to cheer us up simply don't deliver.

The trap

I haven't blogged here for ages. I got a bit confused as to what the point was, as I have no particular expertise, so all I can offer are observations. I'm over that now, though. So, here is another observation.

Adam Curtis is an awesome documentary maker. His last series, "The Power of Nightmares" explored the links between the Neocons and Islamic fundamentalism, going a lot further than the obvious CIA FUNDED BIN LADEN IN AFGHANISTAN!!!!! stuff. His previous series , "The Century of the Self" traced how Freud's ideas have been used in the public sphere, via PR (itself an invention of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew), to cold war propoganda and finally focus groups, giving a hefty and deserved kicking to hippies en route.

His new series kicked off at the weekend. Again it's looking at the "self", and, if I understood this correctly, how we've been taught to recognise a particular kind of self -individualistic, but also paranoid, uncooperative and self-serving. This makes us unhappy, unsurprisingly, and hopefully at some stage he'll tell us that there is another way! and another world is possible! and so on. That would be great.

Anyhow, this stuff was interesting, and will be commented on at greater length after epsiode 2, but there was a facsinating bit about mental ill health and its treatment. David Rosenhan was a psychiatrist inspired by the unorthodox ideas of RD Laing , the leader of the "anti psychiatry" movement. He believed the psychiatric establishment to be wholly unscientific, based on a social construct of what was normal. He conducted an experiment, whereby he and 7 others committed themselves to mental institutions saying they heard voices in their heads (all saying no more than "thump"). Beyond this, they were all to act normally. All were committed, and some stayed in the institutions for months, diagnosed with a range of conditions they did not have. In order to get out, they had to pretend they actually were ill, but getting better. The report of this experiment shocked the mental health establishment, and obviously caused real embarrassment to the instituions invlolved.

So much so, that, accusing Rosenhan of underhand tactics, the institutions requested he send more, anonymous fakes, and this time the would definitely spot them. He agreed, and, over the next few weeks, they proudly reported that they had spotted over 40 imposters, with a similar number of probables. Rosenhan had sent no imposters.

The obvious upshot of this is that extant methods for diagnosing the sane and the insane were exposed as, at the very least, incredibly error ridden, both in terms of sensitivity (spotting those who were mentally ill) and sensitivity (spotting those who weren't). The next bit of the documentary was, in a sense, even more interesting. Curtis explains the response of the psychiatric profession was essentially to redefine their role. Rather than looking at causes - bipolar disorder, schizophrenia etc - they moved to sypmtoms and behaviours. Taking the latter approach means that by ticking certain boxes a person can be called, for example, "Obsessive Compulsive" by definition.

And this is interesting to me because, as Curts points out, the result is that certain behaviours are normal, and desirable, and others, well, others are obsessive compulsive and weird. So checking your e-mail too often is weird, as it washing your hands too much, or constantly looking toward the door to see if anyone you know has just entered. Less flippantly, the permitted set of behaviors it is OK to exhibit is restricted by these definitions.

All of which makes me wonder - does this extend to depression as well? Curtis talked more of OCD and ADHD, with depression being better classed wiith schizophrenia as one of the illnesses old style psychiatry couldn't cure so no longer bothered with. But a common thread among the friends of mine who've beeen depressed, or anxious, was that they felt that this behaviour was not normal. Might it actually be OK to be anxious, or sad, at times? And would knowing that it was OK make it easier to take?

The intro

Hello. This is the start of the blog. Welcome.

This blog is going to be about happiness and unhappiness, as the subtitle above states somewhat prosaically. It's kind of motivated by two thoughts. Firstly, I am increasingly noticing that people (generally) appear not to be very happy. Get on a tube, or a bus, or go into a shop, and you will see largely miserable faces. If you catch a snippet of a stranger's after work mobile phone call, it will almost certainly be unhappy in tone - complaining maybe, downright upset, possibly. A lot of my friends have, at one time or other, been unhappy. Secondly, all of this is in spite of the fact that all of our basic needs and more are catered to. No one's starving, are they? The whole country is undoubtedly better off than it was 50 years ago. The miserable mobile phone call is as likely as not into a new camera phone, possibly with personal organiser and GPS. So it can't be that.

So what is it, then?