Читать книгу Making Happy People: The nature of happiness and its origins in childhood - Paul Martin - Страница 15

So far, then, we have seen that happy people are typically more successful at school and at work, have better social lives, are more creative, live longer, and enjoy better health. And, of course, they are happy, which is arguably the most important thing of all. But despite all these powerful attractions, the state of happiness has not always enjoyed an entirely untainted image. Over the years it has been vilified on various grounds, including claims that it leads to complacency, immorality, self-delusion and even death.

One ancient belief is that pursuing happiness puts us on a path to self-destruction. In their quest for happiness, it is said, people indulge in excesses that are bad for them and bad for others. This notion stems from a basic confusion between happiness and pleasure. There are good reasons for being cautious about the shallow pursuit of pleasure, which does have the potential to be stultifying or self-destructive. But pleasure is not the same as happiness, and a life built on the pursuit of pleasure alone is unlikely to be truly happy.

Another commonplace criticism is that happiness is a form of self-deluding fantasy which blinds us to the awful realities of life or, at the very least, makes us complacent. According to some cynics, the world is such a ghastly place that the only way for intelligent people to be happy is to cut themselves off from reality and live in a fog of self-delusion. When the French President Charles de Gaulle was once asked if he was a happy man, he replied: ‘What sort of fool do you take me for?’ Aldous Huxley famously explored this idea in his 1932 novel Brave New World – a chilling futuristic vision of an all-powerful state in which the masses are kept under control with a drug called soma, which banishes all unhappiness. Liberal quantities of soma ensure that everyone is content, well behaved and free from any disruptively original or subversive thoughts. If anyone should feel a tinge of dissatisfaction or anxiety, they are told to take a gram of soma, which is said to have ‘all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol’ but none of their defects. Only one character in Huxley’s novel, the Savage, is recognisably human – and he claims the right to be unhappy.

A seemingly more technical assault on happiness was mounted in an academic paper published in the respectable Journal of Medical Ethics in 1992. The paper’s author, psychologist Richard Bentall, proposed that happiness should formally be classified as a psychiatric disorder, to be known as ‘major affective disorder, pleasant type’. In support of his thesis, Bentall pointed out that happiness fits the key criteria that psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness: it is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with distinctive patterns of brain activity, and involves distortions in thinking and memory. Happy people, Bentall argued, are impulsive and irrational; they have an unrealistically rosy view of themselves and the world, they find it harder to remember bad experiences, and they overestimate their ability to control events. In other words, they are deluded. Furthermore, their happiness lures them into irrational and damaging behaviour: happy people overindulge in food and alcohol, and become obese.

Happily, Bentall’s paper was a spoof. The real target of his satire was not happiness, but sloppy thinking in psychiatric diagnosis. In reality, there is no reason to believe that happy people are deluded, irrational or living in a fantasy world. Research has found that even very happy people – those fortunate individuals who are consistently much happier than most of the rest of us – still display appropriate emotional responses to the vagaries of life. They may be very happy most of the time, but they do nonetheless experience occasional low moods in response to real disappointments or setbacks. Even very happy people do not live in a state of continuous bliss, cut off from the realities of life.

If anything, the evidence suggests that happiness gives people a better grip on reality. Studies have shown that happy people with a positive outlook on life are better at attending to relevant information, including negative or threatening information. In one set of experiments, volunteers were exposed to potentially worrying information about health, such as evidence of links between caffeine consumption and fibrocystic breast disease. Those individuals who were feeling happy at the time they received this worrying information were more receptive to it, better at remembering it, and more objective in the way they assessed it. Being in a happy, positive frame of mind did not blind them to reality, even when faced with news they might prefer not to hear.

Happy people also appear better able to cope with practical problems because they know when to change tack or give up. This was highlighted by an experiment in which volunteers were confronted with a series of mental tasks,

some of which (unbeknown to them) were literally impossible to solve. Individuals who had a positive, optimistic outlook and a belief in their own ability to control events proved to be significantly better at disengaging from the unsolvable tasks and switching to other tasks that were solvable. The implication is that happy people are more realistic about what they can and cannot achieve.

So the notion that happiness is a form of delusion has little solid basis in fact, and even less to commend it as a philosophy of life. The world might well be a ghastly place, but being unhappy will not make it any better. Happiness does not turn us into ‘contented cows’ – on the contrary, we would all be better off if there were a few more happy people around.

Another dubious piece of folklore asserts that you have to be unhappy to be creative. Happiness encourages intellectual mediocrity, it is claimed, and creative geniuses are usually tortured souls. This romantic belief runs counter to the evidence, which I outlined earlier, that happiness boosts creativity; it is hard to find credible support for the ‘tortured genius’ hypothesis, even in the form of historical anecdotes.

In sum, then, happy people feel better, achieve more, create more, enjoy better health and live longer than unhappy people. They make better employees, better friends, better partners and better parents. They are also less likely to turn to drink, drugs or crime. In a world of happier people there would be less illness, less depression, less crime and shorter queues in doctors’ surgeries. There is nothing feeble or self-indulgent about wanting to make ourselves and our children happier. The only ones who might lose out would be psychotherapists, pharmaceutical companies, drug dealers and the writers of self-help books.