What is Happiness Anyway?

All in all, the last few days have been the most miserable time I have had for ages; thankfully alleviated by the fantastic weekend I have just spent, being whisked off by my friend S, to stay with our friend K. The last weekend we spent together, a veritable 3 days of excessive hilarity and mirth, made it into my best moments of 2006, so this weekend was guaranteed to perk me up.

Last night, upon my return, I got myself together (shortly before my evening out was ruined by the car breaking down and a late night trek across London with the AA - but that's a whole other story), and sat down to write a list of reasons why the things I think I want won't actually make me happy. I shall refer to this list repeatedly, as I am determined not to spend 3 months obsessing and being miserable.

Reading through my list this morning, and then F's post below, I remembered a wonderful article, written by John Diamond at the end of 2000, a few weeks before his death from cancer. Entitled Reasons to be Cheerful, it was published in The Observer on 31 December 2000. That New Year's Eve marked for me the beginning of an annus horribilis, in which, following a disastrous start to the year, my own father was diagnosed with cancer, and passed away 4 months later. As the 6th anniversary of his death approaches, I am reminded of how I read and re-read this article, and how much it helped me gain perspective. I am reproducing it here.

Like most journalists I'm loath to let light in on the magic that is the editorial process, but this was the first commission I've had in 20-odd years in the game which read quite so much like an extract from a suicide note. 'Just tell me, John, what the hell is the point of it all?' said the email from the editor, although it probably had somewhat more potency before I coyly changed the word to 'hell'.

Bizarrely, people hint at much the same question all the time, although few of them put it quite so starkly or are prepared to pay me to try and answer it. This is hardly a boast: were you in my position, they might do the same to you. They think I know something nobody else knows, that I've found the secret answer to a question which, through fear or embarrassment they can't quite bring themselves to ask.

My position is this: I have an apparently terminal disease which doesn't allow me to make any realistic plans for more than a couple of months ahead, a voice which stopped when my cancerous tongue was removed, a diet entirely dependent on the food blender, and a fair to middling amount of pain on most days. To add insult to cancerous injury, I neither feel the need of nor can I discover any comfort in religious faith and I take refuge, legally or otherwise, in no more than the occasional dose of mind-nudging drugs.

And yet most of the time, and within the usual limits, I seem to be happy, even - given my willingness to accept commissions like this one - smugly so. What, they want to know, is the trick?

Well, yes, there's the nice house and the reasonable income from a cushy job that lets me show off in public the loving wife and family, the circle of supportive friends who indulge me in my various whims. To that extent, I suppose I have it all, or as much of it as it's possible to have under the circumstances. But those circumstances do make a difference: I might have it better than most tongueless terminal cases, but I know of no scale against which one can compare friends, family and possessions with the prospect of a long and healthy life. Would I swap a child or a friend or the family house for a new working tongue and a clear scan? Don't even ask, and not least because I'll never have to make the choice.

But it's a fair assumption on the part of my inquisitors: with so little time left for living, what is there to live for?

The easy answer is Philip Larkin's about none of us ever being able to get out of bed in the morning if we had any real sense of our own mortality, and it seems to be an answer borne out by the mortality statistics. Depressed and fraught as we're all meant to be with our fast and unlivable modern lives, last year only 5,000 or so of us were so desperately unable to cope with it all that we killed ourselves, which ranks the act of suicide alongside one or two of the less common cancers as a cause of death. Even if we don't know what there is to live for, we all want to carry on living. Well of course we do - it's what we're programmed for. A species which could take life or leave it alone wouldn't get anywhere like this far in the lottery of evolution; I imagine that death is as much of an unwanted shock to the day-old and senile mayfly as it is to the average Briton who has reached the age at which death is to be expected.

Indeed, before all this happened to me I used sometimes to wonder what it must feel like to be 78 or 82 or 90 and wake up every morning knowing not that today might be your last, but that whatever happened the chances were against life continuing for much longer. How, I wondered, could the Saga company sell holidays to all those elderly types in their elastic-waisted trousers and their treble-E fitting sandals? What were the customers expecting to bring back from their gentle cruise in the Med? Memories? But surely they have enough memories. What can you do with memories when you have only months or a few years to play with them? How can you relax on that cruise when every morning you wake up surprised still to be here and anxious that tomorrow you might not?

Except that here I am, a nominal 47 but in the position of an energetic and slightly breathless 90-year-old with most, but not all, of his faculties, knowing that the chances are against my seeing more than one more birthday and yet I wake up as keen as ever I was to improve the shining hour. I am as happy as I seem to be, yes, but that's because this side of sociopathy or advanced religious zealotry we can only take so much happiness before we are saturated with it. We have a limited capacity for happiness, but an almost infinitely unlimited capacity for, well, not unhappiness exactly, but non-happiness.

Which, I imagine, is why much of the time we are as fulfilled by the various forms of personal non-happiness - anger, disappointment, envy, hatred, frustration, fear, alienation - as we are by contentment. This article, for instance, is a rarity in the British press, with its chirpy positivism and its imminent injunction to look on the bright side. Apart from tales of individual bravery, endeavour or luck, most newspaper stories are designed to enrage, upset, frighten and otherwise encourage all those negative emotions of jealousy and territoriality which we seem to relish, which is why papers published by the types who ask 'Why can't there be more good news in the papers?' invariably fail.

But the truth is that in the developed world, for most of us, most of the time, life is as good as it ever could be and infinitely better than it was for any generation preceding ours. As a teenager, I was, like millions of others, taken with the utopianism of William Morris's News From Nowhere and the description of a society where equality and social justice prevailed and as a result fear, anger, jealousy and the rest of it fell away. It wasn't just that everyone in that impossible world had plenty to eat, a roof over their head and fulfilling work, but that they never woke up feeling grumpy, never envied anyone else their greater happiness, never suffered, in short, from the iniquities not of economic distribution but those of serotonin levels and pain thresholds.

Yes, I know it's easy for me in the soft South to say it, and I know that there is real poverty and deprivation in the country, that the income gap is widening and the distribution of the country's wealth is getting less equitable by the day. And yes, I know too that it's no comfort to the freezing pensioner or the confined single mother at the end of her tether to know that three or four generations ago their lives would have been regarded by the freezing and confined masses as normal or even comparatively desirable. But the fact remains that for the first time in the history of our species, the vast majority of us in the West have more than enough to eat, somewhere relatively warm to live, the ability to move ourselves around the country and even the world as the fancy takes us, a sufficiency of resources with which we can entertain and distract ourselves.

I understand why when the Roundtree Trust reports on poverty in Britain it annoys Daily Mail readers (or, more usually, writers) by including a TV and video recorder in the list of essentials without which normal life isn't considered possible, but I can't bring myself to believe that the reason for most of the unhappiness in the country has to do with economic imbalance as much as it does with some innate need for a couple of portions of discontent as part of our psyche's emotional diet.

But even if you can't agree with that as a description of the country as a whole, let's look at it as a description of you and me, that part of society which reads lengthy essays in broadsheet Sunday newspapers and which, by that definition, has enough superfluous income to afford the paper and enough superfluous time to read it.

The other week, I wrote in this paper about alternative medicine. Briefly put, I was, and am, against it because I think it doesn't work on real organic illness. I don't want to rehearse that argument again here, but what I didn't point out in the piece is that the boom in alternative medicine has little to do with the failure of orthodox remedies to cure serious disease - the vast majority of people with heart conditions or cancer or what have you still, quite rightly, submit to the orthodoxy - but with the alternativists' claims to be able to deal with illnesses which orthodox doctors can't diagnose, let alone treat.

They are, if you like, the luxury illnesses, the illnesses which can be afforded by a society with too little to worry about. In my pre-cancerous, hypochondriacal days, I was forever presenting my GP with vague symp toms of even vaguer illnesses, being sent off for blood tests, investigations to see whether my fluttering heartbeat was a sign of something more organically entrenched than a mere fondness for too many cigarettes, late nights and dodgy social situations. They are the illnesses which result from overexpectation, from the belief that we can feel happy, comfortable, positive, motivated all the time. But to feel that good that often you have to be pretty stupid in that way that stupidity so often manifests itself, as a lack of imagination.

But because most of us aren't stupid and do have enough imagination to posit a world beyond our immediate and personal space and time we create worries which previous generations wouldn't have had time for. It's no coincidence, for instance, that animal rights as anything but the most intellectual of concepts has arrived as a popular movement only with postwar prosperity. Only the rich, with their Gore-Tex and Polar Fleeces can afford to be sniffy about animal skins; in polar societies where you skin a seal or die of hypothermia the options for animal liberationists are more limited.

Or we worry about televised violence but rarely stop to consider that ours is one of a handful of recent generations which only sees that sort of violence on television. I, for instance, have never seen a dead body in, as it were, the flesh, but I doubt if my four-times great grandfather escaping the pogroms of Russia could have said that, or even somebody brought up in a big city during the war. My children have seen only the most cartoon-like violence and are none the less shocked by it; a London child 200 years ago would have lived in a town surrounded by death, disease, prostitution, violence and poverty on a level we can only imagine.

It's the same with politics generally. Until relatively recently, mass political movements were still about basic rights of food, shelter, education and self-sufficiency. The reason fewer people vote these days, or turn up to political meetings, is that for the vast majority of us those rights have been fulfilled. The nearest thing we had to a political rally this year had nothing to do with the rights of man or human suffering or any of the subjects which my forebears - or even my younger self - would have recognised as the sort of thing which brought a country to its knees; no, it was about the price of petrol, and although at one level it was about the conditions that lorry drivers and farmers operate under, for the most part it was about how much it costs us to drive in our own cars into work every day.

The nonsense of the campaign as a chapter in the movement for human rights became most apparent when the lorry drivers hijacked the spectre of the Jarrow March to push their essentially petit-bourgeois message. But then, that's the nature of modern politics and the only time you'll see the old political icons these days are in adverts for mobile phones or foreign holidays where phrases like 'Join the revolution!' and 'Cry freedom!' are bandied about for a generation which knows nothing of their provenance. Just as we have luxury illnesses to replace the real ones, so we now have luxury politics.

All of which seems to have distracted me from the chirpiness I promised and, more importantly, the answer to the editor's question.

And the answer is this:

This is what it's all about. It's about reading a paper on a Sunday morning while you're thinking about whether you can be arsed to go to the neighbours' New Year's Eve party tonight. It's about getting angry with me for having different opinions from yours or not expressing the ones you have as well as you would have expressed them. It's about the breakfast you've just had and the dinner you're going to have. It's about the random acts of kindness which still, magically, preponderate over acts of incivility or nastiness. It's about rereading Great Expectations and about who's going to win the 3.30 at Haydock Park. It's about being able to watch old episodes of Frasier on satellite TV whenever we want, having the choice of three dozen breakfast cereals and seven brands of virgin olive oil at Sainsbury's. It's about loving and being loved, about doing the right thing, about one day being missed when we're gone.

And that's all it's about. It isn't about heaven and hell or the love of Christ or Allah or Yahveh because even if those things do exist, they don't have to exist for us to get on with it.

It is, above all I suppose, about passing time. And the only thing I know that you don't is that time passes at the same rate and in much the same way whether you're going to live to 48 or 148. Why am I happy? Because I'm alive. And the simple answer to the question 'What the hell is the point of it all' is this is the point of it all. You aren't happy? Yes you are: this, here, now, is what happiness is. Enjoy it.