I somehow managed to miss World Happiness Day, which I now read happened two days ago, on Thursday 20th March. For some reason, and perhaps it’s because the world is in such an almighty mess, I was preoccupied with a myriad of shit things going on both personally and in the wider world.
I have been blessed, or maybe even cursed, with a decent level of empathy and sympathy for my fellow woman and man. That empathy and sympathy was always there, to some degree, but I could also be a total prick at times and still can be. I’m hoping the good bits shine through.
I am not entirely sure what World Happiness Day, or the International Day of Happiness as it is properly called, means. I looked at the website (link above) and I am none the wiser. It’s not just about waking up one morning and deciding to celebrate by being happy. Real life ain’t this way, as the music legend (to me) Jay Ferguson once put it. It appears to be quite a lot of things. It doesn’t help that the report was written by academics and not being one clearly doesn’t help.
The United Nations, whose ‘day’ this is, states that World Happiness Day started in Bhutan, which I learn is on the Chinese and Nepalese border. They “famously adopted the goal of Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. It also hosted a High Level Meeting on “Happiness and Well-Being: Defining a New Economic Paradigm” during the sixty-sixth session of the General Assembly.” I think I kind of get that. Basically, you don’t need shit loads of money to be happy, which I know is much easier to say by people who have shit loads of money than those who have nothing.
On this year’s World Happiness Day, I was volunteering at our local food bank – have I ever mentioned I volunteer at a food bank? I must tell you sometime – and it seemed to me that few of our service users weren’t particularly happy. But then, neither would I be if I had nothing to eat and no money to buy something to eat. Or for that matter, poxy temporary housing to boot. By comparison, us volunteers, mainly middle class do-gooders (I regard do-gooders as a good thing, by the way. Much better than do-badders) have it all too easy. We talk to each other about where our next holidays are going to be. Our callers wonder where their next meal is going to come from.
In the 1980s, Britain did change and it changed for the worse. Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and became a kind of British Gordon Gekko. She taught us that we could have it all, to fuck over everyone else in the pursuit of wealth and that greed was good. Her world, like that of the fictional Gekko, was a stain on humanity, the precursor of the twisted me-first world in which we live today. Bhutan’s theory that Gross National Happiness was better and more important than Gross National Product was rather sweet but was trampled all over by the march of capital. The only happiness available was by way of the material world. But what really makes us happy?
Actually, that’s an incredibly difficult question with no single answer. Is it contentment and joy? I’d say so, yes. There may be other components in life, too. And when I am happy, am I completely happy? Some of the people I know and love are still struggling with a million and one issues, once again the world appears to be lurching dangerously towards fascism, many countries are at war, many millions of people are starving to death. Am I happy about that? Oddly enough, no. And England’s 2-0 win last night over Albania served only as a temporary mood lifter, something to help blot out the always present shadow of that black dog.
Just saying this is, or rather was, World Happiness Day won’t do. It’s literally a here today, gone tomorrow non-event to most of us. But we shouldn’t stop striving for everyone to be happier.
The UN calls for “a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes the happiness and well-being of all peoples“, a statement that includes many of my favourite words. God alone knows that (except he doesn’t because he’s not really here) works in reality, given just how little power and influence we, the great unwashed, wield in the world.
I guess we just do the best we can, trying to do good things that make everyone, including ourselves, happier. In reality, that feels almost impossible as people get sick and die and when the rest of the world is in a state of chaos and carnage. And when we can, to celebrate the good things in life wherever we can find them.
I hope someone reminds me when next year’s World Happiness Day comes along. I’m just wondering whether I missed it this year because there’s too much unhappiness around and the media doesn’t have space on which to report it, in which case, what could happen in the next 12 months to improve things? If I knew, I’d be very happy and I’d get very rich selling the happiness secret to the world. Except that the money wouldn’t make me happier, not really. But it might make some aspects of life easier. And maybe I’d be able to make your life happier, too?
