Richard Reeves : Articles : SPEAKERS for BUSINESS

Richard Reeves

European Business Speaker of the Year 2007

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Happiness is a Warm Friend

Richard Reeves

Management Today, May 2002

Did you notice an outbreak of joviality and generosity this week? People beaming at you as they let you go ahead in the bus queue, grinning as they shared your morning traffic jam, smirking through the quarterly budget planning meeting?

No? The organisers of National Smile Week will be down in the mouth. All their efforts to perk us up for at least seven days (and doesn't having just one week for smiling sort of say it all?) have run, then, into the sand of our collective scepticism.

We are a miserable lot. Four out of ten of us think life has become worse in the last five years, more than double the number who reckon things have improved, according to the latest ICM poll. Twelve million of us are on anti-depressants; only a minority of us now think 'people can be trusted most of the time'; a £2 million pound lottery winner, Phil Kitchen, has drunk himself to death.

'As best, people's satisfaction with life is stable, but most of the data suggest that it is actually going down,' says Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University, the UK's leading expert on happiness trends. 'We seems to be feeling more miserable as time passes.'

Mix in some road/air/office/phone rage, a rise in reported incivility and a good dose of political apathy and the misery malaise looks even starker. We live in an Eyeore England.

All this when average house prices have just blasted through the £100,000 mark, when life expectancy continues to lengthen, mortality rates are dropping and more than a third of young people enjoy what was once the elite privilege of higher education. We are healthy, wealthy and wise. Wages are up, unemployment is down. In material terms, we've never had it so good. Yet we've never felt so bad.

If we seem like a nation of ingrates it may be because all the goodies that are supposed to make us happy don't do it for us anymore - even if we have yet to wake up to the fact. So, your house is worth half a million. All you do then is worry about insurance, inheritance tax and of course fester with resentment about the one just up the road that's worth twice as much because it has a south-facing garden.

Karl Marx, who for all his faults knew a bit about capitalism, captured the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses dynamic of market economies perfectly: 'A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all the social requirements of a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace and the little house shrinks to a hut.'

With mass media, the palace doesn't have to be next door - it can be beamed into our living rooms. And the competition doesn't stop with the three-bed semi; it applies to our car, our children's clothes, even our bodies. You might feel OK about your bum until you see Kylie's version plastered everywhere. (A commoditisation which even Marx could not predict.)

Money doesn't make most of us happy anymore. Poor people, understandably, see their life satisfaction rise with income - the psychic case for redistribution - but for most of the population in a country as affluent as ours, any jump-start to wellbeing from a pay rise or new conservatory quickly wears off.

'I was window shopping in the South of France recently and I saw a diamond-studded G-string,' says Oswald. 'When we get to that stage we should realise that more money isn't getting us much more in terms of happiness.' Harrods is currently carrying a pair of shoes priced at a cool million (imagine if you stepped in dog-shit?).

Not that we've stopped trying to buy a better life. Rates of consumption continue to rise - trapping us on what psychologists have dubbed a 'hedonic treadmill', hoping that the next cycle, the next purchase, will finally get us to the promised land.

Nic Marks, who runs the wellbeing project at the New Economics Foundation, says: 'That's the real evil of advertising. Collectively, the adverts send a message that if only you could find and buy the right product, you'd be happy. But it doesn't take much for people to see the futility of this in the end.'

But what about health? Surely the virtual elimination in our society of most fatal diseases, rising life-expectancy and falling mortality should be cheering us up? Not a bit of it. All that happens, according to Marks, is that our expectations rise just as or even more quickly.

'Objectively, our health is better on almost every count' he says. 'But this doesn't translate into people feeling any healthier. People are more aware of their health, so they get more anxious about it. And they also expect the system - the NHS - to take responsibility for it.' Being health-conscious means being health-anxious.

And medicine has become a victim of its own success: having massively reduced the chances of death in childbirth, for example, people are now shocked if a life is lost - and reach for their lawyer. Obstetrics and gynaecology has arguably done more than any other branch of medicine to improve life chances: but it is also the branch with the fastest-rising number of lawsuits pending. Once death as unavoidable - now it is unacceptable. We seek compensation - financial, of course - if things go wrong.

Oswald and others point to two aspects of modern life which may help to explain some of the ennui: commuting and relationship breakdown. People who spend a long time commuting are statistically less satisfied than others: so Stephen Byers can now also take the blame for our foul mood.

More importantly, the rise in 'relationship risk' is linked to unhappiness, says Oswald. 'Divorce, or relationship breakdown, has a profound negative impact on most people. Of course there are good things about a high divorce rates - greater freedom and so on, especially for women - but there is a downside, too.'

With the accepted routes to happiness - marriage, mortgage, money - either blocked or leading nowhere, people are looking for alternatives. The hedonist option, living for the moment, is growing in popularity: cocaine at the weekend, as much sex with as many strangers as possible and last minute holidays to exotic locations.

Evangelical Christianity gives people a similar boost - it is the very smilyness of those in a 'state of grace' that so annoys others. The psychological downer after coming off God, however, is even worse than off most drugs, so in aggregate terms all the Alpha courses and hand-waving may be making us worse off.

On the other hand, there are those looking for inner calm rather than wild Saturday nights or ecstatic Sunday mornings. One in twenty people now regularly hit the yoga mat - a five-fold increase on fifteen years ago. One in five use natural medicines, a three-fold rise. And the number of books published on non-Christian spirituality has just surpassed the Christian portfolio.

'The increases in these sorts of activities are indicators of people looking for something different, of feeling restless,' says Marks. 'But you have to set against them the data suggesting that television watching is on the rise: there are as many people sinking into apathy and passivity as there are searching out new solutions.'

We are unlikely to find a magic bullet for happiness - after all, some of the world's greatest minds have been pondering these questions for a few millennia. It may be that the answer to the question of our happiness is more prosaic. Once countries and households are free of material need (if not of material 'want'), the biggest contributor to life satisfaction seems to be a healthy set of personal relationships.

'There is a lot of nostalgia for the perceived "good old days"', says Melanie Howard, co-director of the Future Foundation. 'But what we do know is that social networks, plus the time to enjoy them, are hugely important. People with lots of money may not feel any better, in part at least because they spend all their time making their money or commuting to and from the place where they make it.'

Time-pressure is the story of the last decade. We want more out of life, but the number of hours in the day remains frustratingly fixed. The relative happiness of those late teens and those passing middle age, shown in the graph [CHECK USED] may relate to their ability to spend more time on their friendships. The thirty-somethings, fighting on the two fronts of work and children, are the most fed-up.

Howard warns that those between full-time education and retirement may be spending more of their time on the activities which they are conditioned to think will make the, happy - earning and spending - than on those which actually will: spending time with friends and family. We turn on the TV to watch others being Friends.

This friend-shaped gap explains the American paradox - why the residents of the richest nation in the history of the world are getting so glum - according to Professor Robert E. Lane at Yale University. 'There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbours, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solidary family life,' he says.

The secret of happiness? Not money - mates. So leave the lawn, forget your investment portfolios and call in sick tomorrow. Do yourself a favour. Phone a friend.