Fight for Misery

Whenever my wife and I fight over a silly or sillier issue, which comes up as often as ridiculously, I recall that anonymous advice: good relations are the best cure for misery. Positively, good relations promote happiness. This truism has been ratified by a century-long Harvard study. One feels good to see something one feels endorsed by a big body of thought.  Yes, great men think alike; small men may do so too. 

I chanced to read again yesterday the observations of the fourth director of that protracted project, Robert Waldinger. Unrelated to it, there was another minuscule survey among young Americans half of whom set money making as life’s great goal. Half of that half yearned to be famous. But that ran sharply counter to the lessons inspired by the century-long study. What is it that makes people? Not really money, nor name, nor even power.

Vijayam. Manam. Dhanam. Success, Honour, Wealth. Add to it, if you like, Power and Security. That is a combination of the world’s cherished values, as set out by N V Krishna Warrier in a long story poem, Fake Gods. The protagonist of the poem was a vivacious doctor who sought and got everything the work-a-day world valued. And yet she ended her life, leaving behind an answerless question what that mysterious pain that gnawed at her heart even as she scaled the heights of life. 

There is no mystery about it as evidenced by the conclusions of the happiness study pursued in Harvard since 1938. No wealth, no fame, no position--nothing of that sort seemed the ultimate goal of life as the unique study. The clearest message of the study is that good relations make for happiness. That it conforms to our ancient anonymous wisdom, or the other way round, is a different matter. Waldinger says they learnt three big but simple lessons.

Lesson 1: Social connections are good. Loneliness kills. Those well-connected to family, community, colleagues lead healthier and happier lives. They live longer. In isolation, people suffer more pain and debility as they grow old. Their brain function declines. One out of five Americans complain about loneliness. There is no record of Indian experience but it seems people here may not be as lonely. In terms of other happiness indicators, they may not do equally well.

Lesson 2: The quality of relationship matters. Not as important is the number of friends and hangers-on. And the measure of quality is whether one feels lonely in a crowd. In spite of a committed relationship, people may remain cocooned in loneliness.  “High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.” That is a gem I share with my wife whenever we are in the mood, with whatever results.

Lesson 3: This conclusion concerns particularly octogenarians like me. It affords an impossible vision of life, an irreversible event and action. Those who nurture good relations in their fifties will be happier and healthier in their eighties than others who had a stormy stint in their fifties. The trouble is there is no scope for getting back to one’s fifties and repairing relations retrospectively. Waldinger says: “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy.”

This paradigm of happiness may leave India sad, sadder. The World Happiness Report ranks India the 139th among the 149 countries it covers. The first is Finland. It may be some consolation that the USA is not the first, nor the UK. Pakistan being 103rd and China 82nd is no good news for us in India. Let us take heart from the fact that Afghanistan is the saddest country. Is the average Indian so lonely, so unconnected, so full of conflict as to earn for the country the dubious distinction of being in the league of the world’s ten saddest countries?

Among the authors of the World Happiness Report is Richard Layard of the London School of Economics who pioneered happiness studies, investigating the economic--or non-economic--content of happiness. Diminishing utility is a principle that applies to every activity, not merely matters of money. What money can buy how much happiness has led to the emergence of a curiously titled area of study, happinomics. How some people are happy having more money than some others is the study of neuroeconomics. It is now fashionable to study the neural network of every human activity.

Long before Richard Layard started his happinomics research, J K Mehta of the Allahabad University had initiated a research on a new interpretation of economic activity as originally conceived by Adam Smith.  Mehta challenged the conventional economic wisdom of limited resources and unlimited wants through his theory of wantlessness. Life is penury and its cure can be had through more resources and more consumption. Mehta more or less abjured that epicurean economics, and envisaged a wantless world, drawing upon the pastoral teachings of Indian savants. 

How life devoid of  attachment can be happy is a moot point. Yet monks, yatis, are held in awe and honour and wonder. Happiness, ananda, was their universal goal. When or why they chose to give themselves that ambitious honorific, ananda, is not known but it has come down to us as life’s cardinal philosophy, requiring monks to discard their usual attire and divorcing themselves from domestic bindings.

The search for happiness has gone on as long as mankind can remember. It is like the barren woman’s child, the hare’s horn, the oasis in the desert, conceived and visualised but never coming well within our grasp. Yes, good relations matter more than anything else, success, honour, wealth, power and security. Yes, good relations. But how are good relations made and maintained? 

That may well be the crux of every happiness inquiry. And that may involve what may be called negative happiness. For instance, the householder who builds his mud hut or mansion not only for him to live but, equally importantly, to make his neighbour livid with jealousy. To end this rambling thought on a sour note, some people are happy when others are unhappy. What do they call it, schadenfreude?