The Secret of Happiness

Though it will never be an official Guide entry, it's arguable that this is the most important page on this site. I say this on no less an authority than Aristotle¹.

Why happiness matters

Aristotle thought happiness was the ultimate aim of life. He said that if you ask someone why they're doing something they will reply, “Because it makes me happy”. If they don't give that reply straight away, they will do so if you probe deeper, something like this:

Q. “Why are you going out to dinner with that attractive person?”

A. “Because it makes me happy.”

or

Q. “Why are you standing for Parliament?”

A. “Because I want power.”

Q. “Why do you want power?”

A. “Because it makes me happy.”

According to Aristotle, every chain of questions like this will end with the answer, “Because it makes me happy”. He points out that if you ask the question, “Why do you want to be happy?” you get no reply. In other words, like “42”² “because it makes me happy” is an ultimate answer.

Now Aristotle has quite a reputation as a thinker, but this wasn't enough to make me entirely happy. For starters, it makes no allowance for genuine altruism. If there is an afterlife and you find yourself sitting on the edge of a cloud chatting with Raoul Wallenberg³ or Oskar Schindler⁴ asking why they saved all those Jews, I don't think you'd get the reply, “because it made me happy”.

Darwin is everywhere at the moment, and evolutionary psychology has its own explanation for why happiness is important: it helps us reproduce our genes (more of this later).

But first, a bit of background.

What happiness isn't

Here are some of the things that are definitely not the secret of happiness:

1. It's not complicated. What we all need is a simple secret, something you can hold in the mind, rather than a complex construction you'll forget five minutes after you've read it. When you get to the end of this article, you'll find the secret of happiness laid out in less than a hundred words.

2. It's not lack of ambition. While researching this piece, I've read suggestions that you'll be happier if you don't pine for big things and concentrate on enjoying what little you've got. To count the few blessings you already have. That's just a recipe for avoiding disappointment. If you actually have the ability to achieve great things, then curtailing your ambitions will simply mean you'll never be happy.

3. It's not, in the words of the old Ray Conniff Singers hit “different things to different people” . The secret of happiness must be the same for everyone, or it's just an excuse for a long list (which, of course, is what exactly what that song is).

4. It's not a cigarette or a cigar, except in the very narrowest sense (see “Level One Happiness” below). The US cigarette brand Kent ran an advertising campaign many years ago based on the Ray Conniff song mentioned above, ending by saying that to a smoker, happiness is a Kent. In the UK, a similar claim was made for a different tobacco product: “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet”. The UK campaign was more ironic than the American one, but equally nonsensical.

Two kinds of happiness

According to psychologist Dr Raj Persaud⁵, there are two kinds of happiness:

1. Level One Happiness, the fleeting kind of happiness you experience after a good meal, a strong drink or a session of sweaty passion. According to Dr Persaud, this kind of happiness tends to last around 15 minutes (he means 15 minutes after the experience is over – he doesn't specify how long the passion session lasts).

2. Level Two Happiness, the longer-lasting kind you feel from the knowledge of a job well done, a mortgage paid off or marriage to the right person. This kind of happiness can last a very long time.

Level two happiness is the rarer of the two. It's also more valuable, something that's reflected in the saying that it is better to give than to receive. The transitory pleasure of tearing the paper off a present does not compare with the satisfaction of knowing that a loved one has that longed-for necklace, camera, Nintendo Wii or PlayStation.

The evolutionary advantages of both kinds of happiness are clear: if you are happy with your home, job, financial situation and your mate (Level Two Happiness) then you can have energetic sex (Level One Happiness) in the knowledge that the result of that ecstasy stands a good chance of survival thanks to your life situation and your larger achievements.

Hold these two types of happiness in your mind as I reveal...

The secret of Level Two Happiness

I found this in a wonderful book called “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day” by Arnold Bennett⁶.

Bennett seems to have been obsessed by happiness, returning to the subject again and again, but the idea expressed in “24 Hours” is the cleverest. The crucial quotation reads as follows:

“Happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.”

Adding Arnold Bennett and Raj Persaud's thinking together together, I interpret this as meaning that Level 2 Happiness can only be achieved by bringing your life and your principles into alignment.

Bennett is no prig: he has absolutely nothing to say about what your principles should be. However, in my opinion there's a limit to how far you can go in adjusting your principles to suit your actions. There are plenty of people in the world who are cruel and otherwise immoral who manage to be happy. However, a strategy of applying cynicism to adjust your principles to your conduct has its risks.

What are principles?

Having built my argument this far on the thinking of Aristotle, Arnold Bennett and Dr Raj Persaud, I shall bring in the big guns in the shape of Saint Paul⁷, who wrote that gentiles who did not have the Jewish law nonetheless obeyed that law instinctively: it was written in their hearts (Romans 2:14).

In my view even the most wicked among us (with the possible exception of psycopaths) have similar senses of right and wrong; we have principles written in our hearts.

Nelson Mandela ⁸seems to have survived 27 years of harsh prison conditions remarkably well, while convicted thieves and murderers held in far more comfortable jails sob at night. That's because Mandela believed in what he was doing.

The Dutch politician Cornelis de Witt (1623 – 1672), who was falsely imprisoned and tortured, provides another example. Alexandre Dumas (père)⁹ wrote about him: “Cornelis was not only possessed of a great mind, but also of a great heart. He belonged to that race of martyrs who, indissolubly wedded to their political convictions as their ancestors were to their faith, are able to smile on pain: while being stretched on the rack, he recited with a firm voice, and scanning the lines according to measure, the first strophe of the 'Justum ac tenacem' of Horace, and, making no confession, tired not only the strength, but even the fanaticism, of his executioners.”

A spectacular recent example is terrorist Leila Khaled, who endured a series of facelift operations without anaesthetic in order to disguise herself to get through airport security and perpetrate a second aircraft hijacking.

As Bennett puts it, “all martyrs are happy, because their conduct and their principles agree.” If burglars believed it was right to steal, he says, “penal servitude would simply mean so many happy years”.

If you do things that go against your principles, then you are only safe while things are going well. You can be a happy pickpocket, exercising your skills and spending your ill-gotten gains, but if you end up in prison your opportunity for experiences that provide Level 1 Happiness will be severely limited. You will have no Level 2 Happiness to fall back on, and you will cry yourself to sleep at night.

Not by Level 1 Happiness alone

As mentioned above, Level 2 Happiness is better than Level 1 Happiness. Some of the saddest people are those who try to make up for their lack of continuous happiness with brief bursts of self-induced short-term happiness: gambling, indulging in promiscuous sex, obsessively consuming drugs, alcohol, food or entertainment, strategies to delay those quiet moments of realisation that there is no Level 2 Happiness in their lives.

You may know people like that. The sneaky, bullying executive of a large corporation who has trodden on the faces of the defenceless, but who has overstepped the mark and finds his failure all the more bitter because he knows his downfall was his own fault. A husband or wife who enjoyed being unfaithful but can't bear to live apart from the kids and/or the partner they betrayed. Alexander Pushkin's¹⁰ poem Eugene Onegin¹¹ describes a man in a similar plight: he kills a friend and rejects the attentions of a woman he later decides is the love of his life, then finds wealth is no consolation.

You can recognise people like this from the way the spark goes out of their eyes, and from premature ageing. People shake their heads and say, “He's a broken man”.

An obvious public example of this is Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, known as Comical Ali, who was Saddam Hussein's spokesman during the 2003 Iraq War. While he was claiming victory as American tanks drove through the streets of Baghdad, he was somehow able to kid himself he was on the right side, and he looked earnest and confident.

• Here he is in happier days

• And here he is white-haired and dull-eyed when the full realisation of failure hit home.

Tragical Ali indeed. In the interests of balance, I should point out that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is beginning to have the same look.

That's not to say all you need to know about principles is already written in your heart. As Bennett put it, you need to develop your reason. You also have to keep up with what is going on around you.

Staying happy in a changing world 1: in society

If you had been young and British in the 1980s, you might have been so disgusted with the Tory party's arrogance and the habit of Members of Parliament, such as Neil Hamilton¹², accepting cash bribes in brown envelopes that you decided to campaign for Labour. If so, you'd have been guilty of helping to put the country into the grip of a clique who believed (or pretended to believe) that Western civilisation was in imminent danger from weapons of mass destruction wielded by a tinpot dictator.

As the body count racked up, as servicemen in unarmoured vehicles became victims of friendly fire, your quiet moments of Level 2 Happiness would have vaporised like guests at a bombed wedding party.

The political situation changed so much between 1996 and today that the only way to bring your conduct and principles into alignment is to adjust your principles in line with the changing environment.

Then you can be happy again.

Incidentally this explains the seemingly intractable unhappiness of some older and more conservative people; they find it hard to adjust to changes in music and fashion, or society's acceptance of same-sex relationships, or the appointment of a black man as President of the United States.

Staying happy in a changing world 2: at work

A similar problem faces everyone who works for a living. If you had left university a dozen years ago with a good degree, you could have been forgiven for thinking banking was the perfect choice for a happy working life: a chance to earn huge amounts of money while gaining respect and envy from any mere brain surgeon or rocket scientist you happened to meet. Only to find a few years later that everyone blames you for everything that's going wrong in the world.

If your degree had been a little worse, you might have been seduced by irresponsible TV programmes into taking up property development, with similarly disastrous and shaming results.

You'd be discovering that employers have little enthusiasm for ex-bankers or failing buy-to-let landlords. And you wouldn't be happy.

Nothing stays the same. If you had been a senior manager in the railway business in the 1870s you'd have been involved in an exciting enterprise opening up new parts of the world to civilisation. A century later, the same job would have meant angry passengers, striking workers and rusting rolling stock. A career in television in the early 1970s meant providing close-up coverage of the Vietnam War and exposing scandals in business and government. In the early 21st century, TV crews in war zones are killed or kept away from the fighting while British television companies in particular are having their own scandals exposed in the newspapers. Football players used to be very badly paid. Singers used to have lower billing than bandmasters. Barristers were once feted like movie stars.

Nothing stays the same.

Unless you're locked into a single career through a calling or an extraordinary talent, you need good information and nimble footwork to find a job in an area that's growing rather than sliding into slime.

Conclusion: the secret of happiness in 92 words

As Arnold Bennett put it, happiness springs “from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.” If you want to build your life on a firm foundation of Level 2 Happiness, then to use a very old-fashioned word you need to be righteous: you need to do things which will make you feel proud whether they succeed or not. You also have to be suspicious, to keep informed about what's going on, and to adjust your principles as well as your conduct in the light of new information.

NOTE: This essay is a synthesis of other people's work. It owes a particular debt to Dr Raj Persaud and Arnold Bennett. The entire text of a lecture delivered by Dr Persaud at Gresham College¹³ on the seventh of December 2005, is posted on a separate Hootoo page here, but you can also watch it on their web site, or download it as an MP3 file. Arnold Bennett's How to Live on 24 Hours a Day is available free from Gutenberg.org either as text or as a talking book.