26. So you want to be happy. Part 1

In the style of “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. Rich is better!” (See Post 19. Plenty and scarcity), this post takes up a modern version of the theme:

“I’ve been happy and I’ve been unhappy, Happy is better.”

We are being exhorted by some commentators to give up Gross Domestic Product as a measure of success and replace it with another, a Gross National Happiness of sorts, or to use the two measures alongside one another. This series of posts looks at the merits and defects of such a move.

In general, although there are challenges even with apparently simple accounting concepts such as profit, money is easy to count; happiness is relatively difficult. A pile of cash or balances at a bank at a point in time are incontrovertible, even if inflation or currency changes may wipe out their value later. Happiness is different. Its measurement is necessarily subjective. And unhappiness does not appear to be a straightforward inversion of happiness.

How can you be happy? Ill start with the earliest years.

1. Choose your parents well - pre-school choices

I know, the word choice is strained here, but it is worth looking at what your “choice” of parents brings.

1.1. Choose parents that live somewhere that isn’t too dangerous. We have managed to despoil some parts of the planet so badly that the air isn’t fit to breath, nor the water to drink, nor the soil to grow food in. We have also found it appropriate to dispossess many people of the means of their subsistence. We also have a nasty habit of finding new reasons to start wars, or repurpose old ones. The proxy wars fought by the rich and powerful nations in poor countries, such as in the Yemen, are execrable. Don’t be born in a place like that.

1.2. Choose healthy parents, in particular those who are not addicted to drink or drugs during your mother’s maternity and in your early years. Ill-health can be character-building. It can show you how challenges can be overcome, and the value of persistence, community and many other virtues, but these responses aren’t guaranteed. Your parent’s good health is not essential to your well-being but it is generally makes life easier for your parents and for you. Having an addict for a mother can directly damage your health as a foetus and a neonate. Having addicted parents is much more risky for you as an infant. Harm isn’t guaranteed but the risks are much higher.

1.3. Choose parents that will show their care for you, especially in the years before you go to school. If you survive childbirth, and your parents aren’t actively abusive, your chances in the world are already looking much better. But neglect can be pretty serious too. If someone doesn’t care for you during your infancy it can permanently impair your development. For example, the damage caused to infants by neglect and abuse in many Romanian orphanages during the rule of Ceau?escu is both tragic and notorious. The children were deprived of the bonds of attachment necessary for healthy development and for many, even those who received care and support later, the results will be seen as long as they live.

1.4. Choose parents that aren’t living in abject poverty. Like ill-health, deep poverty can grind down very resilient people. Like ill-health, living in poverty does not determine bad outcomes but it makes them much more likely. Poverty has some aspects that are absolute and some that are relative. Most modern Western definitions turn on whether or not someone’s material circumstances prevent or enable them to play a full role in the life of their community. Poverty may be imprecise in its measurement but its impacts are clear. It focuses the mind on essentials. Survival is almost everything. Investing in the future is difficult or impossible. When people in poverty do take steps to create a better future, their efforts are much more easily derailed by emergencies and by the demands and circumstances of family and friends who are also likely to be poor.

1.5. Choose parents that are respected in their community. Although there are many ways to decide whether a behaviour is good or bad, and a lot of overlap between the different ways, individual communities tend to define good and bad on their own terms. Honour codes, and other agreements about acceptable behaviours, work just as effectively amongst thieves and mobsters as they do in more genteel groups of citizens. And of course, respect comes in many shapes and sizes; from physical prowess, power and dominance, to practical intelligence, virtue and spiritual leadership. Study after study in both work and in broader community settings has shown that the people at the top are happier and healthier than those at the bottom, even after taking wealth into account. This ease, this confidence from attaining success in the eyes of peers provides the context for the children of the successful as they grow up. And of course, if you grow up in a family like this, your parents will tend to use their social positions and networks to ensure that you retain these benefits.

1.6. Choose parents that set a good example. Some of the fates visited on children are, if not fatal, then really damaging to them as adults but good health, care and attention, and wealth are not enough to guarantee that the child in turn will make good choices. If the press and broadcast media weren’t keen enough to tell us about the excesses of the rich and famous, and those of their children, social media has made sure that many more of us know about them. The best that parents can do, in good health or ill, rich or poor, respected or outcast, is to set good examples in making choices and in behaviour more generally: to help children acquire the virtues. There is another reason to set a good example. Bad behaviours may function at the individual level but be fatal for the community as a whole, either by inflicting harm inwards on the community itself, or by its members succumbing to the power or charms of another way of life.

1.7. Choose parents that give you consistent feedback Your body comes with factory settings that allow you to make sense of the world. Sometimes you will make mistakes and find meaning where there is only randomness, but at this stage don’t worry about that. Your parents help you to understand the world by modelling good behaviours but it so much more difficult to gain that understanding if their behaviours are inconsistent. How are you going to sort the good from the bad? Inconsistent parenting encourages children to manipulate parents to meet their immediate wants and needs. In the short-term, doing the Violet Elizabeth Bott number (I’ll scream and scream and scream until I’m sick) to get your own way might seem like a good plan. Unfortunately for the spoilt child, some social habits are best guided by parents, and consistency makes the messages to the child clearer. Screaming until your parents give in is not a habit that will prime you for long-term happiness.

1.8. Choose parents that will shape your experiences to give you good habits According to the old saying, practice makes perfect. It doesn’t, it makes permanent. Good or bad, what you do repeatedly is likely to stick. I’ll come back to what makes good and bad later.

1.9. Choose parents that let you make (non-fatal) mistakes Serendipity is a precious commodity. It will never be as abundant or as easy to use again as it is now, dear child. The parents and nannies of middle class Victorian England will have supplied the needs, defined above, of most of their charges, but if that could only be achieved by removing most of the opportunities for serendipitous trial and error, a great deal would have been lost. It is natural for your parents to want to protect you from harm but you’ll be challenged beyond their presence soon enough. And in time, permanently. While each new act is different from the last, confidence in the processes of dealing with novelty can be built through experience. This is the most difficult aspect of care for some parents to appreciate. It is also one in which there seems to have been a collective collapse in confidence in parents in many Western countries. In the pre-school years, you need the chance to explore. Yes, through your parents’ example and guidance, but also by and for yourself and with your new-found peers.

1.10. Choose your genetic inheritance well This one is a bit more controversial. The world is getting better, medically, socially and technologically, in enabling people with permanent or debilitating conditions to live fulfilling lives. Some people who live with pain and discomfort do so not just with fortitude but with great vigour, meaning and happiness. On balance, you will find it easier to find happinesses without such challenges but being dealt a good hand with regard to health is no guarantee of happiness, just as being born with health problems and challenges is not a bar to great happiness.

In the next post, I’’ll look at happiness in the next stage of childhood.