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I had a couple of hours to think about my new show about happiness. I still have nothing, but I think this should be quite a rich subject for comedy. This blog will be an attempt for me to splurge my way through a few of the ideas that are occurring to me. Some of it might be in the final show in some form, a lot of it will be rubbish. Don’t read it that will spoil your enjoyment of the future show. And it’s just some fairly disjointed ideas.
There are certainly plenty of internet sites and self help books trying to tell you how you can be happy. Like most clear-thinking people I am suspicious of self help books, but mainly because if you’re interested in helping your self, why are you buying a book written by someone else to do it? You should only read self help books that you’ve written your self. Otherwise what kind of self help is that?
Plenty of successful people seem to put their success down to visualisation or wanting it enough or believing that it will happen and embracing your destiny. Which is fine as far as it goes. But by definition that can’t work for everyone. Success is a comparative thing and by necessity it can only be enjoyed by a few. Unerring self-belief gets you a long way (it worked for Hitler who was convinced he was still going to win the war even as the tanks rolled into Berlin). And if the luck all goes your way, you can start to believe that there is a magic to it all. But of course we rarely hear from the people who had unwavering self-belief, but didn’t make it. A successful person telling you how to become successful is the same as the sperm that fertilised the egg saying to all the other sperm, “I was just focused and swam really hard and believed in myself. I always knew I’d be the one to do this.” Sure, that sperm did swim efficiently, but random chance led it to winning the bollock lottery, a against the other tens of millions of sperm, most of which were equally good at being a sperm, but just didn’t get the lucky break. Once something has happened it seems like destiny and in a competitive environment self-belief, skill and really wanting something will certainly increase your chances of success. But the lottery element is a huge factor, being in the right place at the right time and factors beyond your control just happening to go your way.
Things feel significant after they’ve happened, but maybe the lottery analogy is stronger than the sperm one. The six balls that come out of the lottery machine feel like they must be significant because they are the chosen ones and they’re all over the television. They always believed they’d be chosen and now they have been. So self-belief is the key. But you’re not going to buy a self help book from one of the lottery balls that didn’t make it, who says it always believed it would be chosen, but wasn’t.
Other people tend to search for happiness by working out what makes them unhappy and then doing the opposite. So a promiscuous person might feel sad and decide that celibacy will make them happy. Because happy is the opposite of sad and therefore the key to happiness is to do the opposite of what you’re doing. Or someone with lots of possessions might realise that having lots of possessions doesn’t make them happy, like they assumed it would, so the key to happiness is to do the opposite and have no possessions. But there’s every chance that being celibate and having no stuff will also make you unhappy (I’d say almost certainly) but in a different way. Just because happy is the opposite of sad, doing the opposite of the things that make you sad, will not necessarily make you happy.
A good way many people have to make themselves happy is to live in a dream world constructed of lies where we just ignore the harsh truths of existence.You can make yourself happy by pretending there is a god who is looking after everything and even the bad stuff is part of a plan, or by just ignoring all the terrible things in life that unsettle your view of reality. We all do this to a huge extent and yet still have the cheek to take the piss out of other people for the fragility of their own constructed world.
The world is filled with inequality and unfairness and perhaps that is what makes people unhappy. But striving to sort that out is much more difficult than the glib and simplistic approaches most people have. We all tend to look up the ladder of wealth/success to blame those above us for society’s disparity and a simple solution to the inequalities of wealth is to just share everything out equally. If we did that here in the UK, by my own rough calculations, then everyone would have about £17,000 worth of stuff, of which about £2000 would be cash. That makes a lot of people who would feel that they are not very well off at the moment part of the elite who have to give up some of their stuff. Obviously a big proportion of people must own less than that so they might support the redistribution. But how often would wealth be redistributed under this scheme. What if you sold your £15,000 worth of stuff and spent it all? You’d be left with nothing and someone else would have doubled their money and we’d be back to the awful world of financial inequality. So to keep things fair and everyone equal I think we’d have to have a weekly redistribution of wealth to even things up again. Maybe every Saturday. This system would really favour prodigal sons or turn us all into hedonistic maniacs. And I suspect on each new top up there would be less and less wealth to spread around.
But why this UKIP style redistribution of wealth in only our country? If we want things to be fair then surely this has to be worldwide. There are, as I understand it $50 trillion worth of stuff in the world (about 15% is cash) and 6.6 billion people. To share it all out fairly we’d have about £5000 worth of stuff, £750 of which would be cash.
I wonder how many people in the UK would be prepared to make that sacrifice. All the ones with less that £5000 worth of stuff might be up for it, I guess.
My tips for happiness so far are to drink a pint and a half of Guinness, but no more than that.
You are probably never going to be the most successful person in your town, job, group of friends. It can be hard to accept that fact, especially if you’re foolish enough to have the self-belief to think that you deserve it. You can get eaten up with bitterness and resentment and that will make you unhappy. But you regain the power in this situation if you decide to be genuinely pleased about the success of your rivals. You can’t just pretend to be. You have to be genuinely pleased. Imagine how annoying that is for them. They have struggled their way to the top, worked much harder than you always thinking of how put our and jealous you’re going to be. But if you’re genuinely happy for them then it’s all been for nothing and plus you haven’t even had to put in any of the hard work that has wrecked their lives. Ha ha. Failure is its own success.
