The pursuit of happiness

The pursuit of happiness

Money does not buy happiness, we are told, but as someone once added, ‘it helps finance the illusion’. Saint Paul reminded us in one of the most misquoted phrases of all time, that ‘love of money is the root of all evil’. The ‘pursuit of happiness’ as it has been phrased in the American constitution has always exercised the minds of humanity and lack of money and all that money can make available to us has commonly been seen as the chief barrier to happiness of life. The illusion is persistent. Money is equated with happiness. The message is that life is a lottery in which it ‘could be you’ and money could make you happy. People glibly speak of having, ‘a right to happiness’ often to cover up their own selfishness and the pain they cause to so many others in pursuing this bogus ‘right’. “As long as you’re happy” has become the mantra of justification for questionable behaviour of all kinds, even when that happiness is bought at the expense of so many others, especially fragile little ones.

We all know stories of individuals and families for whom money did not bring happiness. We have heard the stories of the ‘nouveau riche’, the recently wealthy, who make fools of themselves and bring only ridicule on themselves by their flashiness, shallowness and vulgarity. We have seen the effects of the ‘loads of money’ culture in the night-time faces of local lager louts and in the grainy footage of the security cameras that now necessarily sweep our streets for evidence of crime. The question of how we have been changed as a society by affluence or relative wealth remains to be properly investigated and adequately answered.

The Ireland of the middle decades of the last century has long been held up to ridicule. These social conditions from which we have so recently emerged have provided much fuel for critics, novelists, poets and playwrights. The society of that time has been held up to cruel scrutiny by a generation high on the righteousness that comes with hindsight. There is another side to the story of those times as a look at the crime statistics then and now reveals. Among other things, there existed a richness in the quality of community life back then which is conspicuously missing now. I wonder what judgement will history pass on our time of affluence, our biblical ‘seven years of plenty’ when it is held up to the light of judgement. These times of relative affluence, even as they appear to wane, are certainly preferable to times of poverty. As well as material benefits, many people now have a rich choice of work and career options. Nobody wants to go back to times of restriction and scarcity yet affluence often exacts a price and brings a poverty of a different kind in its wake.

Robert Service in his well known monologue, ‘Dangerous Dan Mc Grew’ has the hero speak of, ‘hunger not of the belly kind that’s banished by bacon and beans,/ but the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means’. The homeless of our own time and place are less likely to be those who do not have houses to live in but rather those who have lost a sense of what ‘home’ once meant. They are people whose lives have disintegrated because they have lost their families or whose families have lost them to the imprisonment of addictions of many kinds. Indeed, they may have the largest of houses or even a choice of houses and locations but no real sense of home.

We have been building and buying houses and neglecting to build homes. We are in pursuit of a happiness that remains elusive as a butterfly and find that we have captured a net full of stresses, anxieties and depression. Children often feel neglected by their busy parents, abandoned by their absent fathers, caught in the emotional crossfire of warring parents. ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Neighbours’ are more likely to be encountered on the television screen than at home or on the street. The luxury of innocence is missing from their upbringing. The symbolic and emotional richness of religious traditions that have been abandoned has not been substituted by anything meaningful, leaving a poverty of meaning and hope, a lack of direction or common purpose that sometimes leads to self-annihilation in suicide, a pollution by pornography and a crisis of identity which leads to fads and aberrations of many kinds.

Any society needs common beliefs, images and stories so as to hold together. Where each person insists on doing his or her own thing; claims everything as their right and nothing as their duty and blames everyone else for their failures, then society suffers. If the sickness which affects communities and society were diagnosed and tackled with the same vigour as the epidemic of Hospital bugs, for example, the results and the causes of the sick society might startle us. We can not continue to shift the responsibility for all that goes wrong in society on to government agencies, to teachers, social workers, nurses or others whose function it has become to pick up the pieces of our often crumbling communities. If we want the right to choose, then we ought to pay for our choices by taking personal responsibility for the effects of bad behaviour and for the fall-out from a consumer culture that ironically may result in eating us up.

Richness and poverty are not only measured in Euro or Dollars. Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as one who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Nothing grows forever and as the economic growth of our time comes to a slow-down we may have only our cultural, community and spiritual resources to fall back on. Like business, we need to diversify to survive; to cultivate wealth that is not of a monetary kind if we are to find an approximation of happiness; a society that holds together and an affluence that is truly sustainable. We often say that our health is our wealth. A healthy community is a not inconsiderable form of wealth too.