Latest News
Headmaster's Monday Morning Address
By
May 12, 2008 - 3:38:12 AM

Happiness and Wealth

When people give you things to read, it usually means something. One of the governors, for instance, recently gave me a book called “Why Smart People Do Stupid Things”. I am trying to work out whether I should feel flattered or put out.

So I was initially slightly cautious when my mother recently gave me a newspaper article entitled “Happiness is the measure of true wealth”. Was she implying some veiled criticism of my lifestyle or values, I wondered? I needn’t have worried: she explained to me that she thought it would make for a good talk in assembly. So I ought to thank her, as well as the author of the article, Professor Grayling of Birkbeck College, London, for much of what follows.

As his start-point in the article, Professor Grayling took the recent statistic that, although Britons are twice as rich as they were in 1987, they are no happier.

The initial conclusion from this fact is fairly obvious and has long been common knowledge: there is no direct relationship between wealth and happiness. Money is not life’s answer.

But on closer examination, it is a little more complex than this. Whilst there is no direct relationship between wealth and happiness, if you could arrange for an immediate return to 1987 levels of income and possessions for everyone in the UK, almost everyone would be unhappy as a result. Why? Because as wealth increases, so do expectations. We become accustomed, in other words, to the lifestyle which comes with rising levels of wealth. Not happier, notice – just “accustomed”. For most people, therefore, the sad truth is that, over the course of their life, it is likely that their level of wealth will have to rise simply for their level of happiness to remain constant! Even if their level of wealth remains constant, it is likely that for many people, their level of happiness will actually fall.

‘Happiness’, according to Professor Grayling, turns out not actually to be that useful a concept – partly because it is too vague a notion to be truly helpful. He describes it as like an old garment (a favourite jumper, perhaps) which has lost its elasticity and has become shapeless and baggy. Instead of talking about happiness, one should talk about satisfaction, or achievement, or interest, engagement, enjoyment, growth, or the constant opening of fresh opportunities. Very often the activities that yield these things are challenging, even hard work. A person in the midst of doing something worthwhile might not describe him or herself as happy – usually he or she will be too absorbed to notice. Only later will they realise that what it is to be happy is to be absorbed in something worthwhile. This relates closely to the words of Laurence of Arabia, which I may have quoted in the past: that “happiness is a bi-product of absorption”.

If mere happiness were the point, we could easily achieve it for everyone by suitably medicating the water supply with a chemical which would have that tranquilising effect. Something similar happens in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision of the future in his classic, “Brave New World”, which some of you may have read. But such a vision of medicated happiness is nightmarish, partly because deep down we know that the surest way to unhappiness is to seek it directly and to the exclusion of other goals. Instead, happiness, as Laurence of Arabia recognised, comes as a sideline of other endeavours – endeavours which themselves bring satisfaction and a sense of achievement. Endeavours like hitting a perfect on-drive, or a well-struck three-iron, or helping your team to a narrow victory, or mastering a fiendish passage on the piano, or climbing a tree, or completing a successful chemistry experiment, or singing with the Warminster Singers a particularly rousing passage from Parry’s wonderful anthem, “I was Glad”, or just reading a good book, or solving a mathematical solution – it is in these personal accomplishments, often unacknowledged and even unconsidered, these moments of absorption, when one loses oneself in something, that we achieve that most universal and shimmering, yet elusive and deceptive of goals: happiness.