Most people are reasonably happy, but I think an important and useful question is âWhy arenât we all VERY happy?â Â Â Personally I donât subscribe to the belief that you can only have a certain amount of happiness (and more would have to be counterbalanced by corresponding misery), and certainly in this country we have enough money etc, …so why donât we have more happiness than we do?
I think there are a number of reasons why itâs difficult to increase our happiness, and here they are:
1.  Pressure from other people tends to manifest itself as urgent jobs to do, and we tend to do the urgent things before the important things. And itâs the important things that lead to increased happiness. So we think âIâll just do that last email before playing with my kidsâ or âI need to get to the shops before they shutâ instead of sitting in the sun while itâs there. To manage our time and do some important things amongst the urgent stuff is difficult, but important. When people say they donât have time to do the things they want to, and which would make them happier, they are really saying that their priorities are putting the unhappy before the happy, and they have losing the war against lifeâs pressures (they are not doing enough of my five options: saying no, negotiating, delegating, having better systems, and doing some things less well).
2 â Happiness doesnât come from just one thing but from a collection of lots of small things. If it was just one thing we could major on that, but itâs hard to keep track of all the small stuff â a bit of exercise, a bit of reading, a bit of relaxing, a bit of keeping in contact with friends, a bit of learning, a bit of family time, a bit of planning for the future.
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3.  The balance between achieving and enjoying is hard to get right. If your life is all achievement you wonât be happy because you wont have enough fun, and too much focus on enjoying means youâll end up unhappy because you havenât achieved enough. Getting this balance right needs some planning and some self-discipline which isnât easy.
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4.  We are naturally lazy. In âThe Road Less Travelledâ Scott Peck says that laziness is the root of all of our problems and he might be right â laziness today leads to less happiness tomorrow, since both achieving and enjoying need us to overcome our laziness. Have you ever thought âI canât be botheredâ but then you were pushed into doing something and afterwards you thought âthat was great, I really glad I did that!â
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5.  Short term vs long term: related to the above, we tend to focus on the short term problem in hand rather than the longer term picture, so that later we find the picture is not how we want it. My dog has a totally short term horizon (and is very happy, but only thanks to Muggins buying food etc) and most animals are like that â interestingly the squirrels that my dog chases in vain each day are burying nuts for the winter, so they are a rare example of planning for the long term in the animal kingdom. Avoiding the dog gets priority, but they always fit some nut-burying into each day. People are a step up from dogs but are still mostly short term animals, and this is another reason why itâs hard to be happy in the longer term.
An example of Laziness + Short-termism being âhappiness negativeâ is that we avoid the hassle of learning a musical instrument in the short term and then lose out on the longer term enjoyment of being able to play music later.
So the answers to all this are to…
- think our way through the tradeoffs between short and long term, and between enjoying and achieving, in order to optimise them,
- use our conscious brains to overcome our subconscious tendency to be lazy and to take the easy options, (and to not be self disciplined or assertive enough),
- fill as much of our time as we can with all the small things that add up to our happiness each day â which may require time management and saying no to other things.
onwards and upwards
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