VIEWPOINT

Happiness is not a state of mind but merely an aspiration. Here’s an opinion.

Occasionally, I get called cynical. By which I mean: all the time. It’s a fair cop. I am.

Grumpy? Grouchy? Pessimistic? I’ll take those too, and raise you a rueful. Could we go as far as tormented? Probably not because that suggests some sort of seething, burning spirit of affliction. I’m too dour to seethe or burn about anything much. I get suspicious of any emotions or opinions that run too high or too strong. I like people to rein it in. I’m an Englishman, and from the north.

Let me take this further and declare my view that there is no finer quality in a person than a healthy dose of despondency. Such people are for me.

There is something noble about negativity. Something heroic about looking disappointment square in the eye and asking how he is. Something courageous about keeping friends with the fundamental truth that things perhaps won’t be alright, that life won’t necessarily go to plan, that even as you look into the metaphorical works and congratulate yourself on how spanner-free they appear to be, fate is probably reaching for her toolbox and warming up her throwing arm.

Life, as Thomas Hobbes famously declared, is nasty, brutish and short. To acknowledge this is not gloomy; it is just to accept reality. It is to be sincere. Except… All of the above: you’re not really supposed to say anymore, are you?

Today, the pressure is to be perpetually positive. In the UAE, as in the rest of the world, one can barely move (or brood) for people telling us we should be happier – and, for a few hundred dirhams, often offering to explain how.

Have you noticed it too? This 21st century obsession with being upbeat? The life coaches, social media influencers, corporate agencies and, yes, even magazine articles repeatedly informing us that if we are not constantly content – and, more importantly, if we are not forever expressing as much online – then, somehow, we are doing life wrong? We are failing. Joy has become big business, hasn’t it? Bookshops are filled with volumes with titles like The Happiness Advantage. Counsellors and life coaches fill their boots offering classes in positivity training. Big companies bring in consultants to advise on boosting worker morale.

Even governments are getting in on the vibe. In Bhutan, Gross National Happiness is monitored, while the UK’s Office for National Statistics takes an annual survey of ‘national wellbeing’. The UN has an International Day of Happiness.

Well, here comes my aforementioned cynicism: it’s all nonsense, isn’t it?

This age of aspirational cheerfulness is enough to make a sane man miserable. Striving for happiness as an explicit life goal is not only horribly indulgent and philosophically inarticulate, it is also surely practically unattainable.

Because the one thing about being cynical is you tend to question the world. And, so, of the following, I am almost certain: happiness

does not come from a book written by a selfappointed expert with vague qualifications and vaguer ideas. Nor does it land fully formed in life classes where the brightest and breeziest person in the room is invariably the one making everyone else pay to hear he repeat internetresearched advice.

Rather, real satisfaction – the genuine article, I mean; a sensation so vivid and visceral you can feel it energising your very being – that kind of satisfaction is surely a simple by-product of achieving other things, having other aims, and pursuing other ambitions.

As John Stuart Mill noted in his 19th century masterpiece, Utilitarianism (a book, incidentally, which is worth reading) contentment is valuable, “but not achievable by trying”.

Which is why – do bear with me here – I reckon being unhappy might actually be the secret to finding happiness.

Because it is only the feeling that perhaps life could and should be more – that refusal to accept the world as it is – that inspires improvement. It is only the consideration of miserable outcomes which means we fix rooves when the sun shines or pack lifeboats before the ship sails. It is only pessimism, ultimately, which propels people towards perfection – in art, in sport, in science – by always whispering in their ears that what they’ve achieved already is not yet good enough.

The evidence is all there, writ through history. Columbus set sail for America because he was dejected other explorers had done (and earned) more. Darwin came up with his theory of evolution on the back of his daughter’s death. “Happiness”, said the poet Philip Larkin, “writes white”. That is to say: without misery, art is bland and boring. Suffering improves human existence. Despair channelled right enriches the world.

Jane Fonda is not always considered a go-to philosopher but her 1982 workout slogan fits nicely here: no pain, no gain.

See, ultimately, the happy person – the optimist, the positive-thinker – says with a smile that, hey, things could be worse. But the unhappy one? They say, hey, things could be better, and, perhaps, sets out to make them so.

Don’t take my word for it, though. Aristotle – a man so clued up even Plato referred to him as The Brain – lead the way here a couple of thousand years ago. He reckoned happiness came only to those who do not seek it, and then only at the last.

Between then and now, Nietzsche argued, similarly, that looking for contentment was like searching for a chimera, while Hemmingway declared ‘happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know’. That wasn’t long before he shot himself dead.

But when it comes to global thinkers I like to reference someone more modern. I like to reference Apple man Steve Jobs – mainly because he was widely considered a cheerful sort of chap. He wasn’t, though. Not really.

For he famously inspired himself by asking the mirror each morning: If today was the last day of my life, would I want to do what I’m about to do? Clearly, his answer was a little different to mine – because if today was my closing call I’d probably be eating, drinking and broaching a few taboo subjects with my partner right now – but if that’s not the ultimate pessimist question, then I don’t know what is.

Jobs, daily, imagined the worst – so he could aim for the best. Which sort of brings me full circle to that famous misanthrope Thomas Hobbes – he who called life nasty, brutish and short. Because what is all-too-often overlooked today is the fact that famous line comes from

Leviathan, a book which, at its supposedly dark and bitter heart, helped establish concepts which much of the modern world would end up being built on: freedom, equality, security, rule of law, that kind of jazz.

Hobbes, in short, wasn’t bent on finding ‘authentic happiness’ because he was too busy figuring out a better existence for all.

So, yes, give me that kind of game-changing gloom over a life coach insisting on positive thinking any day of the week. Because, perhaps I will not go quite so far as to agree with the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, who once declared the most depressing thing in the world was “the happiness of stupid people”. But when I keep being called a cynic – a grump, a grouch, a pessimist, whatever – I will at least keep considering it a compliment.

See, ultimately, the happy person – the optimist, the positive-thinker – says with a smile that, hey, things could be worse