Looking for heart of happiness can prove elusive

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/02/2012 (5344 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The World Book of Happiness

By Leo Bormans

Firefly, 350 pages, $30

Happiness is an elusive subject for researchers. It is also elusive for many of us in our daily lives.

Leo Bormans, the editor of this ambitious and colourfully illustrated coffee-table book, invited more than 100 academic researchers from 50 countries to contribute a short piece, about two pages, summarizing what they had learned from their thinking and their research on happiness. Collecting all this material was a bold enterprise.

Most of the essays approach the topic by searching out the life experiences that have an effect on happiness. There is much repetition in the findings and conclusions, and to continue reading through the 100-plus essays becomes a challenge.

If a reader anticipates being taken to the heart of happiness by this book, he will be disappointed. The book continually circles the outer edges, the experiences and circumstances that surround happiness.

The approach taken by almost all the contributors may serve as an introduction to thinking about happiness. This is a little reminiscent of learning to dance from a dance instruction book. “Left foot forward, right foot to the side etc. etc.”

We learn the steps but learn nothing about the experience of dancing. All but two or three of the essays tend to treat happiness as an object, not as a human experience.

A great problem with any happiness research that seeks answers is that all experiences are processed through the unique personality of each individual.

The multiple factors and experiences that form each person are very complex and cannot be quantified. Much of our unique personalities are formed in early childhood and remain with us. We all know from our own experience that the same event may have a great effect on the happiness of one person but may have little effect on another.

Quantitative measures, while they may be of some use, teach little about the experience of happiness.

The short stories of Alice Munro and the poetry of e.e. cummings, for example, provide a more human contextual approach to understanding happiness than does most of the research summarized in here.

The World Book of Happiness, despite its failings, is not pointless. It acts as a good lead-in to considering happiness as being an important issue that may well have a bearing on world peace.

In fact, the chairman of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, apparent sent copies of this book as his New Year’s gift to world leaders.

Students of positive psychology might find it provides good direction for further reading. Individuals aware of their own feeling states may find it useful to judge which of the listed happiness circumstances effects their lives.

Happiness is defined in these pages in a number of ways:

— Happiness is degree to which an individual judges the quality of his/her life.

— Happiness is about finding meaning and purpose in our lives.

— Happiness is created when there is little gap between what we want and what we have.

— Happiness is about seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, and tasting the world around you.

— Happiness is completing difficult tasks of one’s own choosing.

— Happiness lies in not comparing your own life to the lives of others.

Happiness research could be used to provide some guidance to governments in the practices and policies that could provide the greatest happiness benefit to the largest number of citizens. For example:

— Placing emphasis on expanding the GNP in a modern industrialized country is measured to not improve the level of happiness of most citizens.

— Countries with the largest spread in wealth between the rich and the average citizen measured lower in The World Database of Happiness. The industrial countries with the least spread in wealth measured higher on the database.

— Living with a sense of safety and security creates happiness. Unemployment has a large negative effect on happiness.

The life conditions measured to have the greatest positive impact on happiness were those of having a close intimate relationship and good friends and feeling at one with the community and government.

The information is interesting, but what can anyone do to change these conditions and feelings in their lives? What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

It seems probable that leaving childhood with a happy disposition is the critical element that enables one to form a close intimate relationship and good friendships and to feel at one with the community.

We know from thousands of case studies that much of our ability to live happy lives is laid down in the first years of our lives. In these years the neurological pathways are formed that determine a pattern of brain development and which stay with us for the rest of our days.

If being loved and valued is not part of the early experience, then how can we love and value our lives and the lives of others? Changing early life patterning is possible but difficult and all life events, both those deemed positive and negative, gain their emotional colour from early brain development.

Happiness is surely about loving and valuing.

John Buchanan is a retired family therapist in Winnipeg.