Happiness, it turns out, is smile shaped. According to research by the British Household Panel Survey between 1991 and 2003, our levels of happiness start high, decline to a mid-life trough and then come to a second peak during the age bracket 61-70. The result is a cheery U-shape. Or it would be cheery if you weren't, like me, aged 43 and in the slough of despond happiness-wise. But fingers crossed, I will become happier, just so long as I don't get run down by a bus on the cycle home. Wish me luck. And another thing: what happens after you turn 70? On the graph the smile stops abruptly. Does this mean that the British Household Panel Survey is slyly suggesting that after 70 we will be dead or that happiness thereafter plummets so vertiginously that the survey organisers have decided it would make us so miserable to contemplate that bitter truth they have decided to suppress findings in that area?
Another thought occurs: perhaps happiness is in inverse relationship to intelligence. In our first and second childhoods, we are tolerably happy, but intellectually challenged; only in the middle of our lives are we clever enough to realise that life is utterly meaningless, directed towards death and that the unlikelihood of an afterlife means that we have no rational justification for turning that existential frown upside down?
But can there be any basis in fact for this smiley analysis? Look, for instance, at Tony Blair's 43-year-old face shortly after winning the 1997 general election. He should have been in a contentment trough, but he looks sickeningly chirpy, basking in post-electoral glee. Compare his grin then with his wild-eyed, spirit-crushed image now. Is the latter the picture of a happy, or even happier man? Labour's theme song was Things Can Only Get Better. But, if you look at the two images of Blair, you can see the lie at the heart of D:Ream's song. Maybe things can only get worse. If so, should a bus get me, that would be a good thing for Britain's happiness quotient.
No matter how contentious the putatively scientific analysis nor how dubious the argument that the pursuit of contentment should be placed at centre stage, happiness is big business. Richard Layard's book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, just out in paperback, has sold in great numbers; Alain de Botton's every lucrative literary move seems to be about applying some subject (philosophy, Proust, travel and now architecture) to the goal of human contentment; and tonight sees the launch of a BBC2 series The Happiness Formula. Will any of these make us happier? Or just more anxious, self-conscious and thus miserable? I tend towards the latter view, but then I am of the age that predisposes me towards gloom.
Layard points out that as western societies have got richer they have become no more happy. If only western governments were more like Bhutan's, the Himalayan country where every policy is considered not just for its impact on Gross Domestic Product, but also on GNH: "Gross National Happiness". But maybe we are like Bhutan already: Blair's government may have concocted last week's Black Wednesday with the aim of cheering us up by means of enjoying the schadenfreude of government ministers exquisite suffering. If they did, it was a super piece of policy-making.
There are two types of argument to be deployed against this happiness industry: first that we shouldn't pursue happiness; second that we can't pursue happiness.
Even if there is a formula for happiness perhaps we should not pursue it. The historian Thomas Carlyle declared that man can live just as well without happiness. The Gospels seem to indicate that pain and pleasure are incidental to what humans ought to strive for, which is self-perfection (whatever that amounts to). Friedrich Nietzsche, similarly (while lampooning the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice extolled in the Gospels), argues that pain and pleasure are incidental to whatever noble goals should occupy our efforts. But then he was German. He wrote, in an epigram that makes me happy: "Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." True, pleasure is not quite the same thing as happiness, but the English philosophers founded a whole moral philosophy called utilitarianism on the summum bonum of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain. You don't have to be the Marquis de Sade to realise that those two goals might well be in conflict on occasion.
Indeed, there is an argument to be made that the pursuit of happiness is, like the pursuit of wealth, beneath us. There's also another one to be made that the pursuit of happiness, unlike the pursuit of wealth, is self-defeating. J S Mill, one of those English philosophers who defended, realised that happiness is not likely to be the continuous experience of pleasurable rapture. Rather, he argued: "Utility includes not solely the pursuit of happiness, but the prevention or mitigation of unhappiness." But what is happiness? A measurable state? An ephemeral feeling? Equivalent to contentment? Equivalent to the absence of pain? The greatest gift, as Ken Dodd contended, that we possess? We seem hardly clear about what it is, still less that we should pursue it.
The second point is that the pursuit of happiness is self-defeating. a A terrific paper from MIT entitled The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness May Be Self-Defeating argues just this. But when there is so much money to be be made and so many hopes to be stirred by suggesting that we can be happy and that there are ways to achieve such happiness, the paradox of happiness gets ignored. If only people would stop doing surveys and books and TV programmes analysing happiness and exhorting us to cheer up we would stumble, happily, on happiness. Perhaps, though, when I am older I will take a less jaundiced view.
