TruthBook Religious News Blog

Mark Byrne
29 September 2006

A new opinion poll, carried out by Ipsos Mackay during August for the Sydney Morning Herald, reinforces the message of numerous other surveys in recent years: more money doesn’t make us happier, and good relationships are the greatest contributor to wellbeing. This led Australia Institute director Clive Hamilton to proclaim once again that “"We need a wholesale shift in the orientation of government away from a focus on the economy and towards national wellbeing."

However, what if the quest for happiness is part of the problem: one more manifestation of Baby Boomer narcissism; or even a source of unhappiness if we believe we’re not as happy as we should be? As the irascible mid-century Australian philosopher John Anderson reportedly complained, “There’s more to life than being happy!” I’m sure he didn’t think we should merely do our duty, less still that we should be deliberately miserable; rather that a full life should also involve the pursuit of Plato’s “the Good, the True and the Beautiful.”

Hamilton recognises this in the Australia Institute webpaper he authored with Emma Rush. Although this wasn’t picked up by the SMH, there he reminds us that “happiness is a desirable byproduct of living a fully human life, in itself it is not the aim.”

Another way of putting this is to say that there are different kinds or degrees of happiness. While the SMH gave us multiple photos of people smiling and laughing, as if putting on a happy face is all it takes, American psychologist Martin Seligman, the guru of “authentic happiness,” identifies three levels of happiness: the pleasant life (the pursuit of pleasure); the engaged life (“being one with… music, absorbed and immersed in your work, love, friendship and leisure”); and finally, the meaningful life, in which we use our strengths and talents to serve something greater than ourselves.

According to Freud, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” Although it wouldn’t have pleased Freud, there is also evidence of a correlation between religious beliefs and happiness.

What do family, work and religion have in common? As Seligman identifies, a relationship to something outside of, and usually greater than, ourselves. They have one other thing in common, too: through routine and ritual, they tie us to the everyday and the here-and-now, the rhythms of nature, the ground beneath our feet, and a sense of history, of who and where we came from.

The trouble is, if we want our “something greater” to be more than adherence to a football club or a political ideology, and our connection to the everyday and the earth to be more than a question of daily chores and real estate, there is usually a cost. If we want a new life, it most often comes by letting go of the old one. Or, if a new life wants us, often against our conscious will, the old life is wrenched from us in pain.

As the great anthropologist Victor Turner explained, this means “dying” to one’s old life and entering a “betwixt and between” period, in which we feel like one of the walking dead (bereft of energy, feeling or motivation) or the unborn (gestating something of which we are as yet unaware), before the emergence of a new self and a new way of life.

The encounter with death can be literal, as we confront our own mortality or the loss of loved ones. Or it can be symbolic, as we face disease, theft or just the disappointments and failures that life inevitably brings. Something is lost, but by facing the loss and using it as an opportunity to re-evaluate our lives, we often discover a deeper sense of meaning and belonging. Paradoxically, the turning within often ends up with us becoming oriented more towards the welfare of our fellow humans and other beings.

Real happiness don’t come cheap. Hamilton and Rush come close to recognising this in their analysis of the survey question about whether people would choose to take a legal happiness drug. “Tribulations on one’s life path”, they note, “are an inevitable part of any meaningful and fulfilling human life.” More than inevitable. Surrender and sacrifice, loss and despair, may be prerequisites for us to be truly, madly, deeply happy.

What might be the public policy implications of this take on the quest for happiness? The Australia Institute’s Wellbeing Manifesto, which “takes as its starting point the belief that governments in Australia should be devoted to improving our individual and social wellbeing” is a good start. But it’s been around for over a year and to date the grand total of 7276 people have given it their public endorsement. This would seem incongruous in light of the overwhelming public support in the new survey for the government’s prime objective to be “the happiness of the people, not the greatest wealth.” This may be one more indication that we might value happiness above money, but we don’t act accordingly.

In the SMH report, former NSW Minster Michael Egan mocked the idea that governments can help people to be happy, but in fact governments do this all the time (unhappy people tend to vote them out). They just differ in the way they go about it: is it by removing obstacles to individual creativity and entrepreneurship, or is it by providing enough social and other supports so that we don’t have to worry about the basics of life? In other words, is it by focusing on economic or social wellbeing?

Another way of putting the question is to say that it is not so much “How can governments help us in our search for a meaningful life?”, but “What can governments do to help remove the obstacles to that search?” This may involve using both hard economic policy as well as the “soft power” of cultural leadership to influence the work/life balance, the culture of over-consumption, the balance between individualism and social cohesion, and the anxiety that inevitably follows when interest rates and petrol prices are the arbiters of our individual and collective wellbeing.