My happiness
You can’t be constantly happy but you can make the choice to grab it when you can. Stephanie Ockhuysen reports.
Mark Armstrong believes everyone deserves to be happy, no matter what. Even someone inherently evil.
‘‘Everyone deserves happiness,’’ he says magnanimously.
Armstrong is in his 40s and one of a dozen people aged eight to 94 who have this week shared their experiences with happiness and how they achieved it.
To some it was a choice, an attitude, a thing that took practise. For some it was something they created, a byproduct of an easy life, and yet to others the relentless expectation to pursue it was bulls..t.
Even when they do have it, people are not very good at predicting the things that make them happy, says Massey University philosophy professor Bill Fish.
This proved true throughout the project. At the end of each interview, the person was asked ‘what are three things that make you happy?’.
‘‘Oh, I’ve never thought about it before,’’ they would say.
They they would come up with two factors – usually family and friends. A third was never easy.
We are led to believe there is an inherent good in chasing happiness and ‘the good life’. It’s embedded in our language, our culture, the insistence we all smile for the camera. Yet most of us struggle to describe exactly what happiness really is and therefore have little idea how to get there.
This might help explain why New Zealand is in the grip of a mental health crisis where so many of us not only find happiness indescribable, but ultimately deem it unattainable.
But to the rest of the world, New
Zealand is happy. We were ranked eighth on the 2019 World Happiness Report.
The introduction of the Wellbeing Budget further upped our positive perception around the world and saw us placed eleventh on a list of countries with the best reputations.
Many of those interviewed for the project revealed happiness didn’t
just land in their lap, it was something they created.
It is subjective and different for every person.
Of course there are the pillars such as family, friends, security, purpose and so on, but those that are happy have found their own version of happiness, not the idea of it sold to us.
However, not everyone is bestowed with the skills to make that choice or given the tools to make such a creation.
Mental health figures show roughly one in seven young people in New Zealand will suffer some form of depression before the age of
24, one in eight of us over the age of
15 are on antidepressants and on top of that are our horrific youth suicide stats.
Experts say we should focus on being content, rather than happy.
Massey University professor and religious historian Peter Lineman explains that the happiest people are those who don’t aim to be happy.
By instead finding some sort of purpose to their life, and not having happiness as their main pursuit, they gain contentment indirectly.
Lineman says personal contentment, which we could class as happiness, all depends on how ‘you reconcile your circumstances with your ambition’.
Living within our means and limiting desires could help us to be content.
‘‘You can get people with incredibly grand desires, like wanting to be a billionaire, and they’ll be very unhappy because very few people get to be billionaires.’’
Lineman has written and lectured extensively on the religious history of New Zealand and says having a moderate degree of religion in your life increased personal happiness.
At least in a relative sense. Moderately religious people are happier than those with no religion or those who were excessively religious.
‘‘Religiosity gives a sense of personal fulfilment. It gave people answers to fears and concerns and troubles and gave them a philosophy of approaching the hard things in life.’’
However, Lineman reiterated the idea of happiness and contentment being completely subjective.
The circumstances that make one person happy can make another very unhappy.
People who are poorer are (sometimes) at a relative advantage when it comes to their ability to make themselves incrementally happier.
They often have much lower expectations so little things create greater satisfaction, says Massey University anthropology professor Sita Venkateswar.
Things likes getting work, being able to put food on the table or cool rain on a hot day make all the difference.
‘‘Poorer could mean they struggle to even have the basics that we have for granted.
‘‘But just because poorer people seemingly are happier, that doesn’t mean they don’t have the same right to a good life or the basics of life.
‘‘People could say ‘well you are happy as you are, so you can just carry on getting by as you are’.’’
The reason happiness is valued and sought by us all is because it comes and goes, she says.
If it was permanent it would become background noise.
A permanent state would instead be called contentment.
With the rise of consumerism and capitalism the industrialised world has linked happiness to the accumulation of more things.
But we are finding out that more things do not correlate with greater satisfaction or feeling happy, Venkateswar says.
Living the ‘‘good life’’ – having more money, a bigger TV, a bigger house, or a new car may provide a brief feeling of satisfaction but they won’t ensure happiness.
Massey University economics professor Christoph Schumacher says eventually those things aren’t new anymore and you start thinking again about something else.
The idea of earning money to live a meaningful life came from Greek philosopher Aristotle.
Schumacher says research shows an income per person of around $116,000 is the point where someone is at their happiness equilibrium.
After that point more money will not necessarily make you happier.
‘‘The idea is that once you are able to meet your basic needs and you don’t have to worry about paying rent or buying food and clothes, we tend to be at a reasonable level of happiness.’’
In New Zealand most of us have a long way to go to reach the magic $116,000 point.
In 2017, Statistics New Zealand reported New Zealanders were earning an average of $50,000 in salaries and wages.
Happiness is relative, however, Schumacher explains.
So we tend to be happier as long as we have a little bit more than those in our close circle – whatever that amount may be.
Which helps explain why happiness is still possible in impoverished countries, despite the population generally living in conditions that would be considered miserable in wealthy nations.
Schumacher points out the income data only measures materialistic aspects of life.
‘‘Instead it should be asking ‘are you happy living where you are?’’ and ‘are you proud of what you do?."
The idea of wellbeing was introduced by the current Government with its $1.9 billion Wellbeing Budget.
Schumacher says wellbeing could be equated to happiness.
There has been an international trend for governments to recognise that success should not just be tied to an ever increasing GDP but also by the happiness of citizens, he says.
Bhutan currently does this with its Gross National Happiness index, which it introduced more than 20 years ago.
However, in the 2019 World Happiness Report Bhutan was towards the bottom of the list at number 95.
New Zealand came in at number eight.
Ahead of us were Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden.
Helen Russell, author of The
Year of Living Danishly:
Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country and The Atlas of Happiness, says New Zealand is the envy of the world at the moment.
‘‘That’s because of your leader, everyone wants Jacinda. From the outside she seems to embody the best bits of New Zealand that we all wish we had.’’
Russell says to a degree she agrees with the fact happiness is a choice and you can make changes to be happier.
However, she says that can’t be the entire answer as that puts the onus on the individual and with depression, you need help.
When asked about our positive reputation but our grim mental health statistics, Russell says Scandinavia has a similar situation.
Despite Scandinavian countries consistently coming out on top of happiness polls, there are still high levels of antidepressant medication use, relatively high suicide rates, and sick leave used regularly for mental health issues.
‘‘If you know you’re living in this practically perfect Scandinavian utopia, where the infrastructure functions to help people be happy, and you’re not feeling happy but all the people around you seem happy, you feel worse.’’
Denmark regularly ranks high on the happiness chart due to its Government prioritising citizens’ wellbeing. But getting there isn’t cheap.
Danes pay a massive amount of tax. On average the government claws back 45 per cent of their income alone. But their taxes cover them for all health care and schooling and they can claim a lot back.
However, there are also cultural factors at play that material wealth and social security can’t overcome.
Danes aren’t great at talking about sad things and having open conversations, Russell says.
‘‘To be truly happy we need to be able to cope when things go wrong,’’ she says.
‘‘Because that’s life.’’