How to be happy

This would indeed make us one of the happiest societies in the world. However, I am not sure whether this answer reflects Trinidadians’ genuine state of mind or our great capacity for self-deception. The problem with happiness polls, when done in this superficial way, is that they rely on people’s perception of themselves. And, when people are asked about their past emotional states, they often gloss over the negative moods.

But the high number of self-described happy Trinis may also reflect our cultural predilection to mistake pleasure for gratification. "The pleasures are about the senses and the emotions. The gratifications, in contrast, are about enacting personal strengths and virtues," explains psychologist Martin Seligman in his book Authentic Happiness. Pleasure involves emotions such as ecstasy, thrills, orgasm, mirth, exuberance and comfort. Gratifications are activities, like good conversation, playing chess, reading a good book, playing a musical instrument, hitting the ball for four — activities which are all characterised by what is called "flow." Flow has some basic components: the task is challenging and requires skill; we concentrate hard; we have clear goals; we get immediate feedback; we have deep, effortless involvement; there is a sense of control; our sense of self disappears; and time passes unnoticed.

David Rudder once nicely described his own sense of this. "The stage is where I live; everywhere else, I just exist," he said in an interview.

So the real secret to happiness, and a great aid in combating depression, is to pursue gratifications.

"One of the major symptoms of depression is self-absorption," Seligman observes. "The depressed person thinks about how she feels a great deal, excessively so...In contrast with getting in touch with our feelings, the defining criterion of gratification is the absence of feeling, loss of self-consciousness, and total engagement.

"Gratification dispels self-absorption, and the more one has the flow that gratification produces, the less depressed one is. Here, then, is a powerful antidote to the epidemic of depression in youth: strive for more gratifications, while toning down the pursuit of pleasure."

Why, then, doesn’t everyone do this? Seligman lists the several constraints to striving for gratification: the possibility of failure; skill, effort and discipline are required; change, which most people don’t like, is often a consequence; the task can arouse anxiety; and gratification usually means forgoing the chance to do something easier, like drink beer.

Seligman also says that everyone has a genetically determined set range for happiness or depression — that is, whether your typical mood is mildly unhappy, or neutral, or slightly happy or very happy. But your set range has an upper and lower level, so the challenge is really to arrange your external circumstances so you live mostly within the upper level of what your genetic happiness range happens to be. So, if 30-year-old Nadia Ashraph, who hanged herself last Sunday, was really manic-depressive, she perhaps should not have become a lawyer. When researchers at John Hopkins University in the United States examined 104 occupations looking for links with depressive disorders, they found only three jobs where persons had rates of depression higher than the norm for the population. Of these, law topped the list. Seligman identifies three factors which make lawyers more prone to demoralisation than persons in other occupations.

The first is pessimism, because the nature of the legal profession is such that pessimists are better lawyers than optimists.

"Pessimism is seen as a plus among lawyers, because seeing troubles as pervasive and permanent is a component of what the law profession deems prudence," writes Seligman. The second factor is having limited decision-making latitude in high-stress situations. And the third, and worst, factor is that law often has to do with making money rather than giving good counsel — there are few "internal goods," as Seligman puts it.

Now all this is not to say that practising law guarantees that you will be an unhappy person. The Hopkins survey showed a statistical fact, and applied only to American lawyers. In other societies, the practice of law may be different in ways which may mitigate the factors noted by Seligman.

But this seems to be a paradox in the happiness research. Although happiness has a strong genetic component, studies also show that an external factor like political systems affects happiness scores. So, according to Seligman, the strongest of five factors for being happy is living in a wealthy democracy instead of a poor dictatorship. (The other factors are marriage, avoiding negative events, having a rich social network, and being religious — but none of these may be causal or especially strong.) Thus, the three countries with the happiest populations are Denmark, Switzerland and Canada. The three countries with the lowest happiness scores are the Ukraine, Armenia and Belarus — all former Soviet Union countries (so we’re lucky that trade unionist David Abdulah and others of that ilk never got political power here). However, once you get past the 25 poorest countries in the world, there is no relationship between a country’s wealth and its citizens’ happiness, so the key factor here is democracy. But it’s possible that causation runs in the other direction. As economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer remark in their book Happiness and Economics, "It may be that happy citizens are politically more active and therefore achieve more freedom."

However, Frey and Stutzer also found that participation rights were more significant than participation rates in determining a people’s overall happiness: which means that the PNM administration’s attempts to pass a draconian Telecommunications Code, undermine the Freedom of Information Act, and kill the Judicial Amendment Act may well reduce Trinidadians’ happiness quotient.

However, maybe that won’t matter if the MORI poll only reflects our capacity to fool ourselves.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Web site: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh