More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
At its best this individualism offered an ideal of “self-realisation.” But that gospel failed. It did not increase happiness, because it made each individual too anxious about what he could get for himself. If we really want to be happy, we need some concept of a common good, towards which we all contribute.
It defines the common good as the greatest happiness of all, requiring us to care for others as well as for ourselves.
We are heavily driven by the desire to keep up with other people. This leads to a status race, which is self-defeating since if I do better, someone else must do worse. What can we do about this?
People desperately want security—at work, in the family and in their neighbourhoods. They hate unemployment, family break-up and crime in the streets.
How is it possible to maintain trust when society is increasingly mobile and anonymous?
happiness can be excited or tranquil, and misery can be agitated or leaden. These are important distinctions, which correspond to different levels of “arousal.”
Two dimensions of feeling
People who achieve a sense of meaning in their lives are happier than those who live from one pleasure to another.
The search for good feeling is the mechanism that has preserved and multiplied the human race.
We want to be happy, and we act to promote our present and future happiness, given the opportunities open to us.
Much of our anxiety and depression is no longer necessary. The great challenge now is to use our mastery over nature to master ourselves and to give us more of the happiness that we all want.
When people become richer compared with other people, they become happier. But when whole societies have become richer, they have not become happier—at least in the West.
The sceptic’s reaction is to say, “Because of rising expectations, people have increased the standard of happiness that they identify as ‘very happy.’ So people are in fact happier, but they just do not report it.”
whether you are happy with your income depends on how it compares with some norm. And that norm depends on two things: what other people get, and what you yourself are used to getting. In the first case your feelings are governed by social comparison, and in the second by habituation.
When people compare their wages, it is generally with people close to themselves, rather than with film stars or paupers. What matters is what happens to your “reference group,”
If people change their reference group upwards, this can seriously affect their happiness.
a rise in other people’s income hurts your happiness. This basic psychological mechanism reduces the power of economic growth to increase happiness.
most people are not rivalrous about their leisure. But they are rivalrous about income,
So what really does affect us? Seven factors stand out: our family relationships, our financial situation, our work, our community and friends, our health, our personal freedom and our personal values.
work provides not only income but also an extra meaning to life.
living where you can trust others makes a clear difference to your happiness.
Healthy members of the public generally overestimate the loss of happiness that people actually experience from many of the main medical conditions.
We should never forget the importance of the freedoms we enjoy in the West.
people are much happier where they have more rights to referendums.
Unattainable goals are a well-known cause of depression.72 But so too is boredom.
science and technology are the prime source of the changes that affect our attitudes and feelings.
Television also affects our happiness through quite another channel: by raising our standards of comparison.
television creates discontent, by bombarding us with images of body shapes and riches we do not have.
We should not go back to a world without television, but we can surely use our television better than we do now.
The two dominant ideas in the West are now Charles Darwin’s “natural selection” and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.”
I would like to have a “free ride.” But if you also took the same approach, nothing would get done.
when the immediate present is at issue, people press for immediate gratification, even though when the choice lies in the future they take the more long-term view.
To offset the pressure for immediate gratification, it may well take more than the calculation of long-term advantage. A strong moral sense can do the trick. And this feeling will on average benefit us in the long run, by making us more reliable.
people are unlikely to be happy eating lotuses for long. As we have seen, they naturally set themselves goals that involve some challenge, and happiness depends on having goals that are sufficiently stretching but can also be accomplished. Goals give meaning to life.
We all want status—or at least respect. It is wired into our genes and is a major source of satisfaction if we get it.
“It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.”
everything we do to advantage ourselves imposes a “disbenefit” on somebody else.
If my income rises relative to yours, your income falls relative to mine by exactly the same amount. The whole process produces no net social gain, but may involve a massive sacrifice of private life and time with family and friends. It should be discouraged.
In both situations the tax is not distorting (by discouraging something that is desirable) but corrective (by discouraging something that is undesirable). This puts a completely new light on our existing taxes, because both economists and politicians have tended to look on taxes as distorting, even at very low levels of tax.
For our fundamental problem today is a lack of common feeling between people—the notion that life is essentially a competitive struggle. With such a philosophy the losers become alienated and a threat to the rest of us, and even the winners cannot relax in peace.
As Lord Keynes said, “We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”34 Both security and a quiet mind are goods that should increase, not decrease, as people become richer.
I believe that Anglo-Americans have a lot to learn from “old Europe,” where the value of stability is better understood.
The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody. MOTHER TERESA
Society takes enormous trouble over who is allowed to adopt a child, but none about who is allowed to produce one.
laws to permit abortion have greatly reduced the level of crime. On one estimate these laws are the biggest single cause of declining crime in America.
Which causes much more misery: depression or poverty? The answer is depression. It explains more of the variation in happiness than income does, even after we allow for the interrelation between poverty and depression.
Our priorities need a radical change. It is a scandal how little we spend on mental illness compared with, say, poverty. In the fight against misery, psychiatry is in the front line. Along the barricades of the twenty-first century it is a key place where idealists should rally.
The fact is that we can train our feelings. We are not simply victims of our situation, or indeed of our past—exaggerated ideas often associated with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud,
If happiness depends on the gap between your perceived reality and your prior aspiration, cognitive therapy deals mainly with the perception of reality.21 But it is also important to have sensible aspirations. Many people are driven to depression by unrealistic goals.
increasingly cognitive therapy also seeks to curb unrealistic goals, as well as negative thoughts.
