What Makes Us Happy And What Doesn’t?
The happiest people have been shown by extensive research to be those with high levels of self-esteem, who feel in control of their lives, are optimistic and sociable. Being married, having children, being active in your community and having close friendships account for another large percentage of happiness.
According to Maslow xi, there are general types of needs (physiological, safety, love, and esteem) that must be satisfied before a person can act unselfishly. He called these needs “deficiency needs”. As long as we are motivated to satisfy these cravings, we are moving towards growth, toward self-actualisation.
The need for self-actualisation, self-determination, individuation or “individualisation” is “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming”. People who have all of these can maximise their potential. They can seek knowledge, peace, aesthetic experiences and self-fulfilment. This echoes Jung’s concepts of individuation. Psychologist Carol Ryff has done work which shows a high correlation between measures of self-actualisation such as self-acceptance and purpose in life and high levels of happiness and life-satisfaction.
Sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim xii makes clear the distinction between individualisation (self-determination) and individualism (selfishness) in asking “How can the longing for self-determination be brought into harmony with the equally important longing for shared community? How can we simultaneously be individualistic and merge with the group?” and in concluding that genuine self-determination can only be had by committing oneself to others. This idea that centres around Citizenship is indeed consistently shown to be true by Wellbeing studies which show that more community-orientated and selfless people have far higher levels of satisfaction and happiness. What makes us unhappy is, above all, envy.
Community-orientated and selfless people have far higher levels of satisfaction and happiness.
In his latest book The Selfish Capitalist, psychologist Oliver James alerts us to “relative materialism” – also known as “acquisitive materialism” – and shows that in English speaking countries we are twice as likely to suffer from mental illness and depression as in other Western European economies. James puts this down to the post Thatcher/Blair “no such thing as society” form of “selfish capitalism” in the UK, US and Australia which differs from Western European forms of capitalism. The real average wages in English-speaking economies has remained static since the 1970s, but as high tax payers have paid less and less tax over that period, the rich have doubled their share of national income.
Professor Peter Victor has this to say of status or positional goods in Managing Without Growth: “Status goods can be contrasted with useful goods that are of value to the user regardless of whether other people have them. With positional goods, one person’s gain is another’s loss. When an increasing proportion of a society’s consumption consists of positional goods, it reduces the capacity of economic growth to make people better off. In the extreme case, if all growth is in the provision of positional goods, growth is useless for advancing well being. When a person buys a commodity exclusively to enhance their status, others suffer a loss in status unless they make a similar purchase, in which case no one is better off. In both cases buying for status can be a zero sum game in which one person’s gain is completely balanced by the losses of others. Either no one gains, or one person’s gain is another’s loss.”
In Economics of Conspicuous Consumption, Roger Mason finds that there is “an almost total neglect of status consumption within economic theory and thought. As a consequence, a significant part of the economic activity of modern societies lacks any theoretical explanation, and the social, economic and policy implications remain largely unexplored.”xiii
We are increasingly encouraged to compare ourselves with others, resulting in an unsatisfied populace that continually pounds a “hedonic treadmill” to meet escalating goals. In the UK, this means that 40% of households earning more than £50,000 per year still feel they cannot afford to buy everything they really need. 57% of the UK public agree that “I never have enough time to get things done,” whilst 40% are “willing to spend money to save time.”xiv
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