Peoples Republic of South Devon

In Search of Happiness

April 26th, 2008

posted by Jess Sains

The University of Plymouth is seeking volunteers for a self-help study, ‘Improving Moods’. Over a two week period participants are asked to mark whether or not the mind exercises given in a workbook levitate their mood.

Is it really that easy? Two weeks of pseudo-psychological self-assistance and you to can be happy. If only you could bottle happiness, you’d make a fortune. We all seek it, so much so we miss it when it is here. We seek money, so we’re not in debt, poor and unhappy. We seek someone to love us, and for someone to love us we need nice clothes and a decent haircut.

Happiness, like thinness, televisions, love, or sofas, becomes a commodity. Being happy is good, being happy is success.

The media barrages us with misery. Murder, war, sexual perversion, Boris for London Mayor, plane crashes, Amy Winehouse. Perhaps we are meant to feel better because whatever else at least we are not Amy Winehouse. Plus, we don’t live in London, which is surely a win-win situation for us all. But then, equally, it gives us the view that everything is depressing as well.

But if we can’t buy happiness, where is fulfilment? Inside us or somewhere else? Speaking as someone who works, albeit vaguely, in the field of psychology I always find it difficult to place my own happiness in the hands of someone else. My happiness and sadnesses are completely illogical – a bit of sun or a song can make my heart full, a person not saying thank you when I hold the door for them can bring me down. But then surely making happiness entirely internal is equally as worrying; if I do not let others effect me then I risk becoming a psychopath. But then with empathy comes sadness. The murder victim, the starving child, the limbless bomb victim. To have the good points of others we must accept their sadness, perhaps, also.

Surely life - whether in a capitalistic society - or not is about a gambit of emotions. I myself have had one relationship that made me exceptionally happy at one point and deeply, deeply depressed at the another. My relationship with my football club is the same – the good is good because I have felt the bad, cried the tears. Sad clarifies happy? Defines it? Maybe they are the two sides of a coin; one does not exist without the other.

Is the trick to avoid the extremes of one or the other? The highest high, the lowest low – often the two are coupled together. Perhaps we should all make like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty and smile at the plastic bags that blow in the wind?

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Entry Filed under: Society