You may not have noticed, if you have been distracted by the Daily News, that this is National Happiness Week. The pursuit of happiness is one of our inalienable rights, along with life and liberty, and it’s not just a right but a duty. Happiness is certainly a good thing, and this is an excellent week to celebrate it, with Saint Patrick’s Day tomorrow and the first day of spring and the International Day of Happiness on Friday. Happiness seems almost guaranteed, so how are we doing so far?
Not too well, it seems. According to the recently published World Happiness Report, we stand 24th among the nations, the lowest point ever, down from 15th a decade earlier and 11th a decade before that. This is not going in the right direction.
International measures of happiness are complicated and highly controversial. Finland, for example, regularly comes out at the top of the happiness list. But the Finns themselves complain that this is nonsense and that they are at least as miserable as everybody else, if not more so. It’s all relative, of course. Compared to those unfortunate people who are being bombed and slaughtered all around the world, your life and mind are pretty much perfect.
But only half of all Americans report being content with their lives, and the international happiness index puts us way below the Scandinavian countries, but much higher than the Russians, Spanish and Portuguese, who don’t seem very cheerful at all. It's easy to understand the Russians, but I don't know why the Iberians are so gloomy. It must be all that sad music on badly tuned guitars. These differences are pretty consistent. Happy nations tend to stay happy through good times and bad. Depressed nations stay depressed, no matter how many cable channels or Happy Meals they get. Money has almost nothing to do with it.
It seems that the Founding Fathers were wise to specify the pursuit of happiness, rather than happiness itself. Sigmund Freud believed that actual happiness was a form of neurosis in adult human beings, and that the best we should hope for was to walk an unsteady tightrope between mild cheerfulness and mild depression.
There is an old cliché that seems to me profoundly true, that the secret of happiness is to take pleasure in small things, like light after a power cut, or a hot shower after a cold walk - small scraps of pleasure that delight us for the moment, then and quickly become ordinary and taken for granted. If Freud was right, these little flashes of happiness are the best we expect. We should always be ready to seize them when they appear and then be ready to let them go when their moment has passed.
Almost every philosopher and sage for the past five hundred years has weighed in on the problem of happiness. Their collective wisdom, as far as I can tell, can be summed up in the words of Abraham Lincoln: “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Happy happiness week.
