EUREKA I’ve found the formula for happiness... by watching shows like this
Goodbye bad news. I’ve had enough of the bleak headlines and divisive politics, dark TV dramas and hate-filled social media. I’m embracing a new movement with a slightly ridiculous name and a single mission, to make the world a better place. It’s called ‘hopepunk’.
Hopepunk is a spirit or a mood. It isn’t an actual thing. It is a feeling. It is the Scandinavian concept of ‘hygge’ or ‘coziness’ of the mind. It is a warm, happy, charming, uplifting concept that leaves you with a fuzzy feeling in your tummy. It is a glass half-full, rose-tinted glasses that celebrate triumph over adversity.
If you’ve never encountered hopepunk before, I promise you’re going to hear a lot more about it over the next couple of months. The trend is sweeping through the TV world in which I work. It’s the word on everyone’s lips and it’s going to influence just about everything you watch and read.
Think of it as healthy eating for the brain. Instead of constantly snacking on tidbits that make us ill, we can choose good, nourishing entertainment that leaves us feeling better and stronger.
you could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve gone a bit hippy-dippy or succumbed to some piece of air-headed millennial nonsense. on the contrary, I’ve been thinking about this change seriously for at least six months, and I’ve applied it to all the books, TV shows and social media that I consume.
Hopepunk works. Try it and I guarantee you will feel better — and so will the people around you. It’s positively infectious.
I’m a naturally upbeat person. Friends sometimes compare me to a labrador puppy, and I take that as a great compliment. I love life, I love people and I’ve got loads of energy right up to the moment when I’m suddenly asleep.
but over the past few years I’ve been conscious of a sort of spiritual fog that can descend. It’s full of bitterness and anger, and I don’t believe those are my natural emotions. I’ve got so much to be thankful for in life — a wonderful family, rewarding career, the blessings of good health. bitterness and anger shouldn’t have any business with me.
At first, I blamed the divisiveness of the times. Political life was becoming more polarised and the internet swirled with anger. I thought I couldn’t help being affected by the mood of the world.
THen I realised it was partly my own fault. no one was making me watch those shows, buy those books or read online comments. no one was forcing me to watch those terrifying news videos.
I’m a prolific consumer of social media via Twitter and Instagram, at least when I’m filming anywhere in the world with a wifi signal — which these days is practically every place on the planet.
even though the tornado of vitriol swirling on social websites has sometimes driven me to log off in horror, I always went back . . . and suffered another onslaught of their cynicism and fury.
So I made a decision. I determined to seek out more cheerful shows to watch, more upbeat books to read, and to wallow less in social media. As an experiment, my wife and I began watching the gooily romantic First dates on C4 — it’s not the sort of programme that I ever thought could interest a gungho chap like me, but I soon found that at the end of every episode I was smiling, almost floating.
If you’ve never seen First dates, it’s sweet and frothy and served with elegance which suits its setting, an upmarket restaurant in London, where people in search of
romance meet for the first time. Almost always one of them has a story of adversity overcome to relate: an illness, a heartbreak, a bereavement. each lover might be damaged but not defeated.
Though I didn’t know it, that’s the very definition of hopepunk.
Then, over on bbC2, I got hooked by Gone Fishing. I love the defiance of bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse, two very funny men determined to fight back from heart disease . . . with fishing rods.
My policy of avoiding negativity seemed to have an immediate effect. I felt happier. Slept better. The fog retreated and it quickly became easier to stay away from swamps of negativity on the internet. Soon after that, quite unexpectedly, I realised I wasn’t the only person feeling like this. Countless thousands around the world shared my need to make a stand against the torrents of anger and hate. That’s when I heard an editor in a commissioning meeting first use the word ‘hopepunk’.
It was coined in 2017 by a fantasy writer called Alexandra Rowland, who said: ‘Hopepunk says that kindness and softness don’t equal weakness, and that, in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act.
‘Kindness can mean standing up for someone who is being bullied. Kindness is something you can go out and fight for.’
That sounds good to me. We’ve become so used to unkindness in the past 20 years or so. If there’s an army intent on turning the tide, I am ready to join up.
Social media has unleashed a great deal of nastiness. The concept of ‘trolling’, or being maliciously unpleasant to a complete stranger, was unknown before the arrival of the World Wide Web. now it’s an official word in the oxford english dictionary.
Hopepunk is the antithesis of that. It’s about celebration rather than cynicism, being upbeat instead of outraged.
My policy of reading books with an uplifting message led me to former Google executive Mo Gawdat’s 2016 self-help manual, Solve For Happy. Mo’s life was shattered when he lost his son, Ali, aged 21, who died during a routine operation. Struggling with depression, Mo tried to use computer algorithms to work out what would make him happy... and realised happiness is our default mood.
That makes sense, because babies and small children are naturally happy unless something specific makes them sad — hunger, lack of sleep and so on. We’re happy until something external knocks us off course.
And too often, we invite those negative external factors into our lives. We switch on the television and gobble up arguments, divisiveness, anger and darkness.
I’m not denying the world can be a sad, tough place. I’m saying that instead of succumbing we need to make a stand. That’s the spirit of hopepunk.
STATISTICALLy, there is more good in the world than evil, but news tends to be slanted to the negative. For every negative news story, there must be 100 good things that we never get to hear about.
Imagine if you switched on the radio to hear the announcer tell you about a new vaccine, a clever invention, a great new album, a daring rescue and a random act of kindness. How much better that would be than the litany of murders and political mayhem.
Hopepunk is TV shows like Queer eye For The Straight Guy. It is festivals like the Good Life experience. It is books like A Man Called ove. It is podcasts Kind World, and films like The Greatest Showman. It is triumph over adversity and standing up to bullies.
Inspired by this thought, I posted a photograph of myself on Instagram, standing in a river with my tweed trousers rolled up. I can’t explain why, but it made me smile. I wanted to share that smile.
The river was freezing cold, by the way. That didn’t bother me... I’m a hopepunk warrior!