Were we ever as happy as we were during the snow?
In terms of meaningful lives, there are a lot of lessons to be taken from how we coped with the recent weather event, writes Brendan O’Connor
IT might sound odd, but when do you last remember Irish people being as happy as they were during the snow? And yes, I know it was a difficult time and a lot of people were struggling. But happiness does not necessarily equate with things being easy, does it?
The truth is that underneath the struggle, underneath the moaning, underneath the inability to get milk, underneath the being stuck in the house, underneath the troubles of farmers and rural dwellers, there lurked many of the things that make us happy.
There was the connectedness, for example. There was a huge sense of community, of togetherness. Strangers all spoke to each other, we all had this huge common experience. During the snow, there was very little of the alienation that characterises modern life.
And we all had a clear sense of mission, a clear role, a clear job to do. We had one major challenge to face, we could see the enemy clearly and we knew what we needed to do. This sense of a clear mission or goal or struggle to be overcome, this sense of knowing exactly what your role is and where you fit into things, this sense of simplicity, can be a great antidote to the confusion of the modern world.
The feudal peasant struggled, but in a sense, there was a certain happiness and acceptance there, because the peasant had a very definite place and role in society and in the world. As far as he was concerned, this was dictated by God, and so he accepted it as his fate, felt little envy, and didn’t fight it. I’m not suggesting we all become medieval peasants and accept our lot, but there is something to be said for feeling you fit into a larger picture and for knowing your place in it.
Then there was the fact that we were all helping each other. Some people are great at helping other people, and they will testify all the time to how good it makes them feel. And the rest of us nod along, but essentially we keep on in our modern neo-liberal way, thinking that if we can do more for ourselves we will somehow be happier and more fulfilled. This never really works for us, but we keep doing it anyway. “If I get this thing or that thing then I’ll be happier. Oh. It didn’t work. Maybe I need to get that thing instead. That will definitely make me happy and give my life meaning.” It’s the very definition of insanity. Something in our heads keeps conning us that if we look after ourselves, it will somehow pay off. And even though it never does, the idea of doing more for others instead never really takes hold.
In the snow, we did it instinctively. Freed from the prisons of our day-to-day lives, we opened ourselves up to some better nature; call it God, or the holy spirit or the universal consciousness acting through us. We just instinctively helped each other without thinking about it. It was what came naturally. Indeed normal people who commit heroic acts generally don’t think about it too much. The person who dives onto the tracks to pull a child from the path of an oncoming train will say afterwards that they didn’t think. They will say they just felt a force whoosh up in them, instinct, whatever. Just like a good sportsman, when in flow, can act faster than he thinks.
Ordinary people who perform acts of heroism tend to say afterwards something along the lines of, “I just did what anyone would have done”. And that’s how it felt in the snow, as people dug their neighbours out, got messages for the elderly, and performed millions more small acts of kindness.
In the snow, we all noticed that these unthinking, instinctive acts of altruism made us feel good. Helping each other actually made us feel happy and fulfilled. Will we learn that lesson and devote ourselves more to helping others from now on? Probably not. But you’d like to think we might carry away some muscle memory of how helping other people makes us feel good.
It feels like there is a general search for meaning in the air right now. Two of the biggest non-fiction books of the moment, Johann Hari’s Lost Connections and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote To Chaos, present two very different but related views on how a meaningful life is what makes us happy and on how we can achieve that meaning. Funnily enough, a lot of what they both talk about in their books was present in Ireland the week of the storm.
Hari’s book purports to explore the real causes of depression, which he claims lie less in a chemical imbalance in our brain and more in how we live our lives today. While you might not buy his almost complete dismissal of chemical anti-depressants, he has interesting things to say about how life impacts on our mental health. He maintains that a lack of connection — with other people, with our community, with our work, with our sense of a future, with our environment — all cause what we call depression and anxiety. He would certainly have got a chapter out of the snow in Ireland.
There was, for example, in a strange way, something grounding and fulfilling in how connected we were to the natural world last week. Some of that connection was against our will, but we were certainly interacting with our natural environment in a way we aren’t normally, whether that was building snowmen or digging ourselves out of our houses.
Hari reckons that part of our problem as human animals is that we are missing the connection with our habitat and the natural web around us that we crave. He says this so-called biophilia runs deep in us, pointing out that we have been in our habitat as mammals and primates for hundreds of millions of years. Yet, he says, we tend to seek the answers to problems like depression and unhappiness in the languages and symbols we have constructed as a species. These words and symbols, he says, are relatively recent things. Our habitat, a more ancient thing, impacts on us in a much more profound way as a source of connection. We cannot be healthy animals, he says, unless we are moving in our habitat, and equally, he points out that being in nature makes us feel smaller in the grand scheme of things, and thus diminishes our egos, which helps us to be happier too.
Of course, the snow was not an easy time for everyone, and I don’t mean at all to make light of it. While life has gone back to normal for many of us now, there are people who will be coping with the devastation for some time. And talk to small businesspeople and some of them tell you they will struggle to pay wages this month; most of them feel they will never get back the business they lost.
No one is suggesting that the snow was a good thing, but there is no doubt that it was a moment, and before we move on and get back to business as usual, it is worth examining what happened and what we could learn from it. And without being twee, maybe what we learnt is that we should help each other more, get out in the elements a bit more, talk to each other a bit more, keep our lives as simple as possible and try to remember a bit more our shared humanity, and that we are all in this together.
‘It feels like there is a general search for meaning in the air right now’