Front Bit: Pursuing a happy life

Opinion

It has been a wonderful feeling of late, to realise that summer has not forsaken us ... entirely.

It's great to wake up, knowing a bright, sunny day lies ahead. It feels like ... happiness. Early morning walks become a pleasure as we stroll among the bright colours and heady scents of gardens in bloom and the full, abundant greens of trees in leaf. From within that verdure comes the song of the early bird and the hum of everything that shares the planet with us.

But the world would be a different place if the dark clouds and chill winds of another season replaced that sunny morning. The early morning walk would lose its lustre and it would be just another hour of exercise.

The idea that sunshine should equate to happiness is not new to us; similes abound where the sun represents a smile and its warmth the sensation a smile can create, whether giving or receiving. And songs are filled with metaphorical cloudy skies and rainy days of sadness.

So, if sunny weather equates to happiness, and dull days are the misery equivalent, does it then follow that in countries with more sunshine hours and higher temperatures the inhabitants are happier? It must be so; poets and songwriters have been saying it for centuries. Granted, many of them have been listening to the rain on the roof and wintry gales howling at the door while they dreamed of endless blue from every horizon. But even the Beach Boys, blessed with California sun, preached a culture of happiness and fun on the western beaches. They did not even have to imagine it - they were there.

Therefore, if our days were sunnier and the weather warmer, we would be a happier race, and if we were happier we would be more content ... and require less of anything, because we would already have everything we need.

Happiness is that feeling of knowing we have it all, even if that is very little. Our needs are proportional to our feelings of discontentment; the unhappier we are, the more we want. If we only had more money in the bank, how happy we would be. If my television were flat screen, HD, 3D, of cinematic proportions with surround sound and monstrous speakers ... I'd be so much happier. If my car was bigger, faster, newer, a better colour, more reliable, European, expensive ... I wouldn't need anything else. Yes I would. But if I'm satisfied with everything I have right now, be it not much, relatively speaking, then that feeling of contentment is, apart from love, one of the most powerful feelings we can ever experience.

The trouble is, happiness is a low achiever. It took unhappy people to provide the world we know today. It was a miserable sod, cold and unhappy, who bothered to experiment with bits of flint and dry material in order to create fire on demand. If he had been quite content in his misery, we'd still be in the same cave, eating raw meat and shivering happily. Discontented people have driven progress from the word go, or whatever guttural sound was the prehistoric equivalent. They employed intelligent, creative, equally unhappy people, demanding they invent everything we would need for the 21st century. Payment depended on the success of the product but, ultimately, it is we who collected the wages of those industrious (but gloomy) souls. The guy (or girl) who invented the wheel never got to cruise the streets in a new Holden, arm out the window and the stereo up loud. He (yeah, alright, or she) made it possible for someone hundreds of generations down the line to do that, however unhappily.

The chap who came up with plastic had no idea that China would build an economy on it and all things would be made of it. And who invented logarithms? They must have been so unhappy they were practically suicidal. Heaven knows, they passed that unhappiness on to generations of school children.

So it is that discontentment drives advancement. After all, if you're happy sitting in the rain, you're not going to invent an umbrella, are you? But the moment the drizzle gets annoying or uncomfortable, you're going to start looking for bits of bamboo and some floral-patterned nylon.

Obviously, being happy is not all it's cracked up to be, and we would not have what we have today if our forebears had been content with the way things were.

So what is it with this pursuit of happiness to which we're all entitled? Isn't that condemning us to a life of misery as we strive to attain the impossible? Isn't that simply cruel? To deprive us of the feeling of contentment we could feel if we did not go in search of greater happiness and bigger, better endorphins, is tantamount to locking us in a luxurious mansion and telling us the world outside is much better and we deserve to have it.

This opinion piece began with a sunny day and a feeling of happiness. But it really started with an ambition fuelled by discontentment as I looked at an empty page (computer screen) and knew I would not be happy until it was filled with words. The satisfaction of having achieved that will only last until I look at the next blank page. And so on. Is that a cloud on the horizon?

Feedback: paul.brooks@wanganuichronicle.co.nz