HAPPINESS:IT IS TEN TO ELEVEN on a warm Thursday morning. I am sitting outside the Cake Café on Dublin's Camden Street. People say the coffee is good here. The menu is simple but appealing, and it features more than cakes.
Today I will order sardines on toast: old-fashioned comfort food. They also serve fresh orange juice that is actually squeezed to order, not freshly brought in from some warehouse off the M50. Yes, good spot. In the past week alone I have spent three mornings here. And why not? I am, after all, unemployed.
Until last November I was the editor of a magazine that chronicles life in the capital: the new restaurants, the hidden treasures and the must-see shows. When The Dublinerwas sold to another publisher, I found myself out of a job for the first time in 11 years. Good enough. I chose to leave, one of the lucky ones.
For six months I did all the things a single man in his late thirties is supposed to do with time on his hands. I drank a lot, missed the office, drank too much, read books about how to find happiness. I went to Hong Kong, Melbourne and Mumbai. I spent a week meditating in a Buddhist monastery. There I resolved to live a simpler, happier life. To take it easy on myself, the people around me and the planet. I came home to a city on its knees.
At a time of crisis it is deemed important that everyone puts on a united front. For some people that means driving to Punchestown rather than arriving in a helicopter. For others it means encouraging the retail sector by shopping for clothes in second-hand shops. Black is the colour I wear, but black is not the colour I feel inside. I am having a good recession. I’ve been reading, gardening, cooking for friends, and now, after years recommending it in print, I am sitting outside the Cake Café.
So here I am, taking it easy. Drinking green tea. Smiling at the staff in the bashful manner of a customer who does not want to be ushered out because he has nowhere to go in a hurry. Idle contemplation – see how the words sit together. Lying low feels okay on such a glorious morning. Yes, I walked away from a job, and not, like nearly 200,000 people this past 12 months, the other way around. Maybe I am unqualified to speak on this subject. Yet I do feel part of something greater than my own clumsy narrative.
Recession is a social leveller. It requires all of us to reassess our values. In the New York Timeslast month, the writer Pico Iyer explained why he has left the frenetic pace of Manhattan for a somewhat austere life in a two-room Kyoto apartment. "I'm not sure," wrote Iyer, "how much outward details or accomplishments really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multi-millionaires … and I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied."
Inspired by Henry David Thoreau, who spent two years in the wilderness before writing Walden, Pico Iyer has rid himself of many so-called conveniences. And those he has kept are seldom used. His phone rings once a week, and when it does he is enlivened, as he never was when the phone rang in his Manhattan skyscraper office. “At some point,” writes Iyer, “I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all that I did.”
Many people are arriving at the same conclusion about consumerism – even in the most unlikely places. When Barack Obama finished exhorting his fellow Americans to put away childish things, he went back to the White House to tend his organic vegetable garden and hang out with a new puppy. For the good life, nowadays read the simple life.
Last month The Irish Timespublished an interview with Joe Higgins, the recently elected MEP for Dublin. It is not often that Trotskyite arguments are taken seriously in a national newspaper. When Higgins urges people to take democratic control over major resources he is completely sincere, and this is unsettling. So, too, is the fact that he backs up rhetoric with a frugal lifestyle. He insists on living on the average net-industrial wage, his mobile phone is seven years old and his car is a 1992 Toyota Corolla.
“I like to have a decent, dignified life,” Higgins told the paper, “and once I have enough for that, that’s fine. What do I want more for? What do want to amass their bloody hotels and homes in Barbados and Switzerland, and become tax exiles for? For what?”
For several days that interview with Joe Higgins was among the most read articles on the Irish Times website. This does not mean that we have all become windy socialists, but it does suggest that Higgins is onto something. Religion and the markets are having a bad time. Religion will survive; the prognosis for Mammon is less certain. Have we finally acknowledged that the doctrine of “more” is unsustainable? That money can’t buy real happiness? That capitalism is just as frail and corruptible as socialism? And if so, where do we turn?
Of the 10 best-selling books in the Dubray bookshop on Grafton Street, three have the word happiness in the title. The authors are US psychologists and their books are full of anecdote, age-old wisdom and impressive new research. If you haven’t got around to reading them – doing nothing sometimes takes a lot of time – you may have seen works such as Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt mentioned in newspaper articles. But perhaps you have cut down on your reading in an effort to spend more time daydreaming and less time thinking about the recession. Here is a summary of common conclusions in the literature of happiness.
10 Commandments for Slow Readers
1. Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.
2. Money makes us happy, but once you reach a surprisingly modest income level, how much you earn doesn’t really affect your happiness.
3. Beware of status anxiety.
4. Advertising is predicated on the lie that you are somehow inferior. Avoid it.
5. Find work that completely absorbs you.
6. Practise gratitude. And smile. Now.
7. Are you smiling?
8. We tend to overestimate the amount of happiness that good fortune will bring – but we also overestimate the amount of unhappiness that bad fortune will bring.
9. Don’t have lots of friends. Have a few good friends.
10. Have vital engagements. Believe in something larger than yourself.
Does that all seem rational? Most of it is common sense and there is little that constitutes news. Mark Twain said, “My life has been filled with miseries and failures, most of which never happened.” It was Shakespeare who wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” The Talmud, which was written thousands of years ago, includes the following line: “Who is rich? The one who appreciates what he has.” Eleanor Roosevelt had this to add: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
They are all articulations of the same observation. Today it is dressed up as a revelation of positive psychology. And while there is nothing wrong with that (there is, after all, nothing new under the sun) there are other, more awkward truths about living well. It is not that the high priests of happiness are wrong. Their commandments may require footnotes.
Firstly, let us acknowledge that positive affirmations are useful, but only for as long as they are repeated. Some are hackneyed, others glib. I am particularly sceptical about bland exhortations to de-clutter, as if nirvana were merely the result of excessive spring-cleaning. Henry David Thoreau: “We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” And I am suspicious of the promise that anyone can taste pure, unadulterated happiness all the time. Try telling someone with a chemical imbalance.
Happy. Idle happy. Yet I am still trying to hear what beastly plot the suits at the table beside me are hatching. Will it always be like this? (Thoreau’s cabin in the woods was 2.4 kilometres from his house in town.) Elsewhere a middle-aged man trawls the web. He doesn’t look “funemployed”, a new word for people who have lost their jobs and are secretly happy about it. Maybe he is looking for work to ensure that no one in his family will go hungry next week, or that mortgage repayments might be met. I imagine that for him right now the purpose of life is to survive it. Peace and quiet are not always enough.
A more serene existence has its own irritations. We all want a simpler life, but no one wants to be called simple. The other day a friend came up from her home in the Wicklow mountains. She says a big problem for Dubliners who move to the country is bigoted remarks from friends who still live in the city. At first the hostility is hard to understand. And then, after several glasses of wine: “Ah sure you’re doing nothing down there.” The implication is that people who don’t spend hours in gridlock each day are losers.
(Big Food exploits this intolerance. In 2006 the food writer Joanna Blythman told me, “The food industry has sold us a couple of very dangerous ideas. The first is that we don’t have time to cook, so we should buy processed, pre-prepared foods. The second is that if you do have time to cook you must be stuck away in the backwaters of modern life.”)
As it turns out, Americans are just as ambivalent about simplicity. Pico Iyer’s essay attracted hundreds of responses. While many readers agreed with his prescription for happiness, others demurred. “I applaud the virtues of simple living,” wrote a single mother, “but I have to point out that it is a choice only if you start off privileged enough to be able to uproot yourself ... I do not find any romance in having little money.” But another reader boasted that he enjoys the simple pleasure of floating on his back in his new $80,000 swimming pool. “I love my life,” he claimed, “especially since it’s a reward for the hard work I’ve been doing to create it.”
An $80,000 swimming pool is not my idea of success. But I have also worked hard to create the circumstances in which I might devote an entire morning to this matter. And I can assure you that the high priests of happiness are right: the simple life has much to recommend it. However, its virtues are best contemplated in the knowledge that there are no pressing demands on one’s time. Simplicity is nice if you can afford it.
Example: Harry Eyres. A published poet and self-styled promoter of slowness, Eyres writes a column called “Slow Life” that is read by wealthy businessmen in the Financial Times each Saturday. In theory he seems like a strange choice as columnist for the in-house journal of capitalism. A banker friend explains the allure of his languid reflections:
“Reading Harry Eyres is like gliding downriver on a summer evening, drinking in the detail on the river bank, on and beneath the river surface, in the air and up into the clouds above. After reading him I turn to Tyler Brûlé, whose ‘Fast Lane’ column on the same page documents all that is new and hip. It’s like being on a jet-ski. You have the illusion of freedom to cover greater ground – and impress onlookers. But it quickly becomes quite boring. In the end, it’s Harry in the slow lane who has the more interesting life.”
There is one further observation that demands to be made about the 10 commandments. I say this as someone who has not had a cup of coffee in three months. And I don’t want you to think it’s some sort of dig at green tea, which I really do like. Next Saturday I fully intend to succumb to the scent of roasted Arabica. And the promise of that Americano sustains me in a way that is almost equal to the pleasure of gardening or meditating. Simplicity is worth celebrating. I really believe that. But so, too, is choice. (That’s why putting Harry Eyres and Tyler Brûlé on the same page is fine editing. But wait! I’m no editor.)
The morning devotions are over. Time for sardines on toast and, yes, a glass of orange juice, squeezed on a manual press to order. Age-old pleasure. I should put away this laptop now, stop trying to look busy. There’s an Irish Times on the counter inside: alarming headlines, two new crosswords. If the sun stays out I could be here all afternoon.