What’s the happiness pill?
By Mohinder Singh

THAT’s the paradox. We’ve never had it so good, and yet we stay less happy than our parents or grandparents. Perhaps we’re pursuing happiness too hard. Many want a motorcar to pursue happiness — and there happens to be no speed limit in this pursuit. Pursuing happiness may well be a lot easier if everybody slowed down a bit.

In the book Britain on the Couch: Why we are Unhappier compared with 1950, Despite being Richer, the writer makes the point that more of his countrymen are depressed now than 50 years ago, even though they are markedly better off. Similarly Robert Frank in his book Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to satisfy in an Era of Excess claims that decades of rapidly increasing affluence and lavish spending in America has not made anyone happier.

Clearly the growth of prosperity and march of consumerism hasn’t generated the hoped for happiness. What was once a luxury becomes a common expectation. This makes its absence a source of dissatisfaction. And the inexorable law of diminishing returns. Enjoyable activities lose their savour with repletion, be it eating chocolates or driving fast cars.

Surveys in various countries, both developed and developing, have consistently indicated a significant rise (around 20 per cent in the last two decades) in people suffering from depression. Rising levels of drug abuse, even suicides among the young is another pointer to the prevailing unhappiness. One in ten people in advanced populations has been depressed, say the experts.

And mind, this is despite the widespread use of the happiness pill, Prozac. Indeed, treatment of depression is rated as "psychiatry’s number one success story"; combining counselling with a new generation of drugs.

Why do so many people stay unhappy for no ostensible reason? In fact the incidence of unhappiness is higher in the well-off sections. One explanation is the spread of Godlessness. Life used to have God at its centre. A setback or deprivation was accepted as a part of the divine purpose. A lot of people no longer have that kind of faith. And with belief in afterlife waning, it becomes all the more important to find happiness here on this earth.

Another explanation is that far more people are now without work, either through rising unemployment or long periods of retirement. When you’re busy working you have less time to feel unhappy. Take the retirees. With lengthening life spans and better health standards, many more people with fairly active minds and bodies are living out decades without purposeful work. No wonder, the middle-age are prone to depression.

Some even blame television as a contributory factor in abetting unhappiness. Watching TV is essentially a solitary activity, that cuts into one’s socialising and face-to-face conversations. People stay glued to television instead of visiting friends or talking to neighbours. And socialising is one known antidote to unhappiness.

And now recent research at Carnegie Mellon University brings out that Internet use could cause a decline in psychological well-being. And it wasn’t that people who were already feeling bad spent more time on the Internet, but that using the Net actually appeared to cause bad feelings.

Researchers are puzzled over the results, which were completely contrary to their expectations. They expected that the Net would prove socially healthier than television, since the Net allows users to choose their information and to communicate with others.

The fact that Internet use reduces time available for family and friends may account for the drop in well-being, researchers hypothesised. Faceless, bodiless communication may be less psychologically satisfying than actual conversation. Another possibility is that exposure to the wider world via the Net makes users less satisfied with their lives. Here it’s important to remember this is not about the technology per se; it’s about how it is used.

Are there any ways of making people feel happier? Happiness, it’s said, is more a question of disposition than position, something even genetic. We may feel happy or miserable for some time, but soon we revert to our usual self; the discontented remain so; the sunny-natured continue to be cheerful. The change in circumstances merely causes a blip in the predictable graph of our lives.

Money can surely ward off the unhappiness that comes with want, but money is no guarantor of happiness. Several studies have revealed that big winners of lotteries were not appreciably happier after a year or two of their win. With more money your adaptation level goes up. The kind of lifestyle you expect drifts upwards, without necessarily a corresponding rise in happiness levels.

Surveys show that marriage seems to prevent people from becoming unhappy. Marriage does so mainly by sharing problems and preventing loneliness. Married men live longer, have superior mental health, lower suicide rates, and better career prospects. And the association between marital happiness and overall happiness is even stronger for married women than for their husbands. Yet it would make little sense to argue that marriage provides a magic cure for unhappiness. Anyway the happiness marriage provides tends to fluctuate over time.

What can you do to promote happiness? Experts are agreed that the best recipe is to keep yourself busy. When people say they are happy, they are almost always busy, and caught up in activity — they are too busy to be miserable. They have less time for introspection and it’s introspection that often chases away happiness. More so the sort of introspection that slips into self-deprecation. That way getting interested in others instead of focussing all the time on one’s own problems is a sure help. People whose main concern is their own happiness seldom find it.

For phases of mild depression, brisk exercise is likely to be more effective than pills and therapy.

"No man is happy who does not think himself so," said Marcus Aurelius many centuries ago. A few modern psychologists go a step further. In their view, acting happy is likely to make you happy.

Better feign happiness if you don’t feel like it. Fake it. Pretend self-esteem. Feign optimism. To some the whole thing may sound phoney but the phoniness should gradually subside. You’re in a testy mood but when the phone rings you feign cheerfulness while talking to a friend. Strangely, after hanging up, you no longer feel so grumpy.