happiness

am I happy? i don’t know … i think half the time it’s not knowing what level of happiness i should be at that stops me from saying – yes, i’m happy. i wonder if others are in fact much happier than i am? should i be feeling happy? isn’t there something more?

it reminds me of tree-planting, when rookies get cream. let me decipher this language to some of you who may not be planters … as a beginner planter, you (like everyone else) get good, bad, terrible or sometimes very good ground that we call ‘cream’. so when a new planter looks at their ground and doesn’t realize this is the best they are ever likely to get, they just start planting in the ordinary way – plant for a bit, sit down for a rest, eat a sandwich, have a smoke, plant some more.

when experienced planters gets cream they goes crazy! they know that if you don’t plant this quickly, soon enough others will start coming onto your land to ‘help’ you to finish it. there’s not much cream usually and it goes quickly. so the experienced planter pulls out all stops! no sitting down! nothing but plant, run back to bag up and plant like there’s no tomorrow. an experienced planter knows that this IS cream.

so knowing that yes, this IS happiness is a big thing.

but what IS happiness? does money bring happiness? well the scientific answer (and we so love scientific answers don’t we?) is that it’s the little things in life that govern whether we feel happy or not. for the purpose of the study, rich people and middle and low income people were given little bleepers and throughout the day at various times when their bleepers went off, they were asked to enter whether they felt happy or not at that precise moment.

the results of this study concluded that in fact, whether you were rich or not had nothing to do with your level of happiness. researchers found that the link between wealth and good mood to be “greatly exaggerated and mostly an illusion”. it was little things, like the joy in the cup of tea you were drinking, or whether you felt good after your night’s sleep, or whether any number of small seemingly insignificant things made you feel good at that particular time that determined your overall level of happiness. “even a life-changing event like winning the lottery or suffering a disabling injury doesn't preoccupy most people for ever” researchers said. “eventually, rich or poor, we all go back to focussing on how good our breakfast tastes and what's on TV.”

my good friend mary holding posted on facebook recently: ‘for the first time in my life, I'm not waiting for anything to happen so that I can be happy’.

don’t you just love what she said?

ps. this is an interesting analysis: The Economics of Happiness
Wednesday 31 August 2011
by: Jeffrey D. Sachs, Project Syndicate | News Analysis