In search of happiness; are we looking too hard?

I received an email today, telling me of the happy smiling faces of the people of Madagascar. It got my thinking, would anyone ever say the people of Britain are happy smiley people? Well, no, they wouldn’t. Why? Because we’re not. We’re a nation of apathetic, cynical grouches. Only yesterday I saw a London commuter snap at a hapless traveller who didn’t move his foot fast enough. And I thought the English were supposed to be polite. We’re not, we’re selfish, self-involved and so thoroughly wrapped up in the rat-race and profit chasing that we’ll tread on anyone who gets in our way. I speak generally of course. Not all of us are like that, just the majority it seems.

So the Malagasy are happy despite being subsidence farmers, living on the poverty line and the English are miserable despite being filthy rich in comparison. Hmm… what’s wrong with this picture? The obvious answer is money doesn’t buy you happiness. We thought it might, pursuing the ‘American dream’ of a house, car, white goods and all mod cons but instead we’ve found that consumerism has no limits. What ever we have is never enough, we just want more and more.

In the pursuit of happiness we’ve forgotten what happiness is all about. Deep down we all know that money doesn’t buy us happiness. What makes us happy is sitting in the sun on a summer’s day or spending time with friends and family, but instead we’re in front of a desk, damaging our eyes to make money for some faceless company. Again I’m speaking generally about those London commuters but most of us are selling off huge chunks of our lives in exchange for money to buy stuff to compensate for the lack of time we have to spend with friends or sit in the sun. I’ve been warned off the ‘poor but happy’ ideal but in this demoralised modern world is does seem like a very tempting alternative.