Gloom is good

The coldest winter for 30 years. Britain the last G20 country to beat the recession. And now four months of Nick Clegg on the stump. No wonder US students refer to depression at this time of year as a “February funk.” But can anything be done?

This February is also the month that Harvard academic Derek Bok publishes The Politics of Happiness (Princeton University Press) asking whether governments should really try to make their citizens happier. Answer: yes, not through promoting economic growth, but through environmental policies, healthcare and strengthening marriage and the family.

Bok’s is the latest in a long line of attempts to examine contentment. At first glance, the evidence for eternal sunshine seems strong. A much-quoted 30-year study at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, found optimists lived on average 19 per cent longer than pessimists. Since Bhutan adopted gross national happiness rather than GDP as the government yardstick for measuring progress, life expectancy has jumped from 43 years to 66, and literacy from 10 per cent to 66 per cent. As well as income, citizens’ social, cultural, religious and environmental needs are taken into account. Meanwhile, Labour’s own Dr Pangloss, Gordon Brown, has consulted “happiness tsar” Richard Layard, and put mental health workers in all job centres.



But the malcontents are rising up. In January, American author Barbara Ehrenreich promoted the idea of “defensive pessimism” in her book Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World (Granta). She thinks a combination of a violent reaction to 19th-century Calvinism and the growth of the Christian Science movement has created today’s perma-smile positivity. Ehrenreich has scientific backing too: a November study in Australasian Science found grumpiness makes us think more clearly. Researchers found that grouches make better decisions and were more attentive than their Tiggerish counterparts. And, when judging the truth of urban myths and eyewitness accounts, misery guts made fewer mistakes.

This suggests that bad moods developed for an evolutionary reason: as an alarm signal to make us pay more attention. Ignoring them, then, could be dangerous. “What is more desirable: seeing and experiencing the world as it is, including all the negatives, or a mindset that seeks to ignore and discount reality in search of optimism and positivity?” asks the report’s author, Joe Forgas.

But it is Bok who provides the best rebuttal to forced positivity. In his book, he quotes psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen, who found that identical twins brought up apart showed remarkably similar levels of happiness. They concluded that most of the variation in any person’s contentment is genetically fixed. Indeed, they ended their 1996 paper with the gnomic utterance: “Trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller.” So if even standing on tiptoes won’t get you through a February funk, you might as well enjoy it.