Craig Brown despairs at another book on how human beings can find happiness

Happy Ever After: Escaping The Myth Of The Perfect Life

Paul Dolan

Allen Lane £20

Rating:

One of the very first self-help bestsellers was called How To Be Happy Though Human. It was written by an American psychiatrist called Walter Beran Wolfe, and was published in 1931. Wolfe’s key message was that the pursuit of happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

‘If you observe a really happy man,’ wrote Wolfe, in his most famous sentence, ‘you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under a radiator.’

The central message of Happy Ever After is that though we are brought up to believe that wealth, success and marriage are the surest routes to happiness, in many cases we would be better off without them. Quite a few of the studies and surveys on which Dolan relies seem to come straight from the research department of the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious

The central message of Happy Ever After is that though we are brought up to believe that wealth, success and marriage are the surest routes to happiness, in many cases we would be better off without them. Quite a few of the studies and surveys on which Dolan relies seem to come straight from the research department of the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious

Yet still we scrabble around for that elusive collar button. If you go to the Amazon books website and type in ‘Happy’, up pop no fewer than 50,000 titles, including Five Steps To Happy, The Happy Puppy Handbook, Eat Happy and Create Your Own Happy, as well as countless books called How To Be Happy. This latter group also gives rise to endless sub-categories, such as How To Be Happy Alone, How To Be A Happy Single Mother, How To Be A Happy Muslim, How To Be Happy In Your Marriage and the super-ambitious How To Be Happy All The Time.

And now along comes Happy Ever After by Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, no less. Dolan’s first book was called Happiness By Design. He also has a burgeoning TV career as the presenter of Channel 5’s bikini-based reality show Make Or Break?, which seems to be targeted at viewers who found Love Island heavy-going.

The central message of Happy Ever After is that though we are brought up to believe that wealth, success and marriage are the surest routes to happiness, in many cases we would be better off without them. Thousands of wealthy and successful people are miserable; many marriages end in tears. Dolan concludes by saying: ‘I encourage all you parents out there to allow your kids to pursue lives that are good for them, whether or not this means them following a narrative.’ This echoes an earlier statement: ‘If you are a parent, reinforcing the narrative at home that some money can be enough will help children learn from an early age that the relentless pursuit of money is not inevitable.’

In other words, he is saying what Walter Beran Wolfe said, nearly 90 years ago, or what William Blake said, in a more poetic way, 200 years ago:

He who binds himself to joy 

Does the winged life destroy 

But he who kisses the joy as it flies 

Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

Since Professor Dolan is a behavioural scientist, he feels the need to base his conclusions not on the wisdom of great writers and thinkers but on a never-ending parade of studies and experiments. He likes to begin his sentences with the words ‘According to a recent Norwegian study…’ or ‘A recent lab-based study has demonstrated that…’

Some of these studies are undeniably interesting. For instance, research into the effects of the Canadian national lottery discovered that in the two years following a major win, the neighbours of the winners are more likely to file for bankruptcy. This suggests that the poor neighbours, riddled with envy and determined to keep up with the Joneses, spend more money than they have.

I also enjoyed learning that two out of every five users of Tinder are already in relationships, and that four out of five divorces in the US are filed by women. On the other hand, quite a few of the studies and surveys on which Dolan relies seem to come straight from the research department of the Institute of the Bleeding Obvious.

Take this one: ‘Studies have shown that people report feeling less intimate during conversations in which they are withholding the truth.’ Whatever next? Studies have shown that tall people are more likely to reach things on high shelves than short people, though further studies suggest that, when a ladder is involved, the results tend to even up?

IT’S A FACT! 

According to the 2018 World Happiness Report, Finland is the happiest country on Earth. The least happy is Burundi and the UK ranks 19th.

At one point he tells us that ‘Study after study… has shown that poverty makes people miserable’. At another, he explains that, after a divorce, ‘more easy-going children fare better’. Furthermore, ‘the characteristics of the children themselves and the coping strategies they adopt influence the extent to which they suffer from their parents’ divorce’. Does it really need a professor of behavioural science to slog his way through learned studies in order to come up with that conclusion?

Studies and surveys rain down on virtually every page. Some are hard to believe. Can it really be true, for instance, that at Cambridge University, ‘40 per cent of all students reading English had been diagnosed with depression’? Who knows? Perhaps they were all forced to read Beowulf. Dolan mentions this survey in a chapter on education, which, he argues, may not guarantee a life of happiness. This is, I suppose, a bold line for an academic to take, though the rest of us might have guessed it already.

On the other hand, Dolan takes things on to another, more controversial, level when he argues in favour of university fees. ‘I see no credible basis upon which builders in Bristol should subsidise the university education of the children of financiers in Finchley… I object to the idea that those who do not or cannot go to university should subsidise those who do through higher taxation.’ Whether or not one agrees with him, it is at moments like these that his book springs to life, and seems to be reaching for something beyond the banalities of received opinion.

Happy Ever After is written in a peculiar, and sometimes jarring, mixture of academic drudgery and populist fizz. Some branches of academia still believe that the only sentence worth writing is the sentence that cannot be understood in one reading. For the most part, Dolan writes clearly, but from time to time he falls back on gobbledegook. ‘The benefits of adopting a negative utilitarian perspective,’ begins one sentence, ‘are nowhere more obvious than when addressing the harm caused by the Responsible narrative.’ Come again?

Happy Ever After is written in a peculiar, and sometimes jarring, mixture of academic drudgery and populist fizz

Happy Ever After is written in a peculiar, and sometimes jarring, mixture of academic drudgery and populist fizz

Yet he can also swing the other way, peppering his narrative with frothy illustrations from showbiz, not least from his own career on the voyeuristic Make Or Break? In one chapter he argues, perfectly cogently, that anonymity doesn’t make altruism any more worthy. ‘That we might benefit personally from helping others should be celebrated, not undermined,’ he says. Fair enough, but then he suddenly comes over all Jeremy Clarkson and goes into a bullish rant in defence of David Beckham. ‘If anyone has the ear of anyone on the Honours Committee, tell them to give Goldenballs his f****** knighthood,’ he concludes. Incidentally, on the very first page of the book, he defends his right to swear, arguing that it is a necessary part of his working-class identity and that, what’s more, ‘There is evidence… to suggest that students pay more attention to a teacher who swears’.

And in another chapter, arguing that society places too high a premium on having children, he says: ‘Jennifer Aniston is a good example: whatever else she might do in life, she is nonetheless pitied for her childlessness.’ Well, call me fuddy-duddy but I had no idea that Jennifer Aniston was childless; I only know that I have never seen a good film with her in it, though that is, I suppose, a matter for another book.

Dolan has claimed in the past never to have read a novel. If he had, he might have read one by Edith Wharton, in which one of her characters says: ‘If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.’ This is the point of Happy Ever After, too, but stated at much greater length. Incidentally, it comes with very positive pre-publication quotes from academic colleagues on the back, one from Professor Daniel Gilbert, ‘author of Stumbling On Happiness’, and another from Professor Richard Layard, ‘author of Happiness: Lessons From A New Science’. Of the making of books on happiness, there is no end.

 

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