The externalisation of happiness

A middle-aged City trader has gone on holiday – a very unusual thing for someone who regularly works weekends as well as excruciatingly long hours during the week. But there he is, walking down a beach and grimacing at the underutilised hours, his separation from his beloved Bourses, and his blank-faced Blackberry nestling like an electronic corpse in his khaki pocket. He comes across a jetty and wanders to the end. There, and sitting in a small wooden boat, is a fisherman. The City trader says hello. The Fisherman says hello and introduces himself as Pong.

“What’re you doing?” asks the City man. “Well”, replies Pong, “I’m just cleaning the fish I caught this morning. My day has been very typical. I got up, had breakfast with my wife and chatted to the kids. I came out here fishing, and in a minute I’m going to take the fish to market, go home and have lunch with and make love to my wife, and play with the kids when they come home from school. This evening my friend will come round, we’ll play guitar on the porch together, drinking red wine, and then I’ll go to bed”.

“Hmmm”, says the City trader, scratching his neatly-trimmed goatee (greying until quite recently) with elegantly-manicured fingers. “That sounds really nice. But you know what? If instead of going home in the afternoon to see your wife and kids, you fished again in the afternoon, you could sell enough fish to be able to buy another boat, and pay someone to fish in it. You keep doing this, you could expand the whole thing until you have a bunch of people working for you on a fleet of bigger and bigger fishing boats, selling to supermarket chains. It could grow, and perhaps one day float your company publicly! Think of that! Retire at 50!”

Pong is intrigued. “What happens then?”

“Well”, replies the trader, “I guess you get to spend your days doing what you really want. Spend time with the kids when they come to see you, hang out with your buddy, drink wine, play guitar, make love to your wife”.

It’s opportune to tell this parable now, as I'm in fact sprawled on a beach watching fishermen in their boats bringing back the day’s catch. The parable is, of course, quite trite. First of all, not everyone lives in a part of the world or under circumstances that would permit making enough from a half-day’s work to support a family and give one’s children support and real opportunities in life. Second, even a corporate junkie working long and high-stress hours can still find time for marital love-making, spending time with his or her children, playing an instrument and boozing with friends. It is, I would think, not an easy thing. But having already seen some people manage it very well, I see no reason why plenty of others could not do the same.

And third, Man’s willingness to work more than a subsistence life has led to an astonishing smorgasbord of discovery, innovation, science, the arts – the spectrum of human imagination and achievement without which I think we can all agree - the world would be a poorer place. We might very well each have different human achievements on our individual lists – but I think it can be fairly said: humans over the past 500 years in particular would be considered a rather ambitious species to a visiting Martian. In short, if the world were populated solely by Pongs, we would give up a lot that is good.

Anyway, I’m at this moment in paradise – which also goes by the name of Lamai beach on the island of Koh Samui in southern Thailand – and watching a bunch of normally-overworked Europeans snooze on the beach while the various Pongs of Koh Samui bring in their day’s catch.

I’ve been travelling for over three months now, a trip that’s already taken me across fourteen countries and across the paths of hundreds if not thousands of people. Local service people, fellow itinerants, expats, business travellers, local academics and NGO workers, the insane and the just plain lost. The purpose of this trip (or at least its primary purpose) was to put together a qualitative look at whether people are happy, if so why and if not why not, and how happiness varies among different peoples. This was a daunting task at the start and only gets harder as you wrestle with the timeless nemesis: individuality. Every attempt to draw general conclusions about groups is continually undermined by the caveat you must keep at the forefront of your mind: that people – despite their necessary membership of groups such as gender, age, religion, socio-economic status – are nevertheless individuals. Any contemporary analysis of twin studies reveals that the age-old nature/nurture debate is helpful but incomplete. You cannot isolate an individual’s traits, beliefs and character by considering it a mere function of his or her genes and upbringing. There’s something else. And whatever you call it – the soul, the self, the mind – it plays havoc with all attempts to draw conclusions about people. I have a degree in psychology and didn’t learn very much from it aside from this nauseatingly frustrating truth: that people are much more complicated than the output of an equation. Psychologists know this, but try to brush over it because it belittles their profession to conclude they don’t know much more than they know. The unknown unknowns – to quote my favourite neoconservative American poet – abound. In short, people are – and I apologise for the manifest obviousness of this statement – all individuals.

So as I said, this truth is a spectre that haunts attempts to describe what people are like. And I could tell you stories – interesting ones, too! – that I’ve heard along the way so far. Being nosey and loquacious by nature, I seem to be pretty good at getting people to talk. But the other truth – albeit less obvious than the first – is that everyone has a tale to tell. Everyone is interesting. Even the most soporific individuals – the people who make you want to weep into your beer with boredom – have, if you press hard enough, something special, something unique, something which imports the ‘self’ into the first half of that equation and produces something intangible and wonderful in the second.

But I won’t just recount stories for now. Instead, I want to try and tell you what I have learnt so far about people and peoples as a whole. So please accept the above caveat about the spectre of ‘self’ as what it is – an acknowledgement that everything I say is not merely subject to many exceptions, but might also be just patently wrong.

As I said above, lying on the hot sand with waves lapping at my feet and the scent of coconut oil from the nearby massage beds mixing with the fresh seafood in the Phad Thai they’re cooking up the beach, is an appropriate time and place to consider the nature of happiness. Many if not most people, when asked what they'd do after winning the lottery, or what their perfect holiday entails, respond with some variation of lying on a beach in a tropical paradise. Usually with cocktails served out of coconuts, fresh food, clear waters and a good book. A casual stroll a couple of miles up this coast supports this. Spread through the hundreds of chalets, bungalows and hammocks that nestle in the swaying palm trees that caress this shore are hundreds of tourists in two – and really only two – categories.

The first are overwhelmingly middle class Europeans and North Americans. Affluent, generally middle-aged, married or divorced, they’re here for exactly the reason you’d imagine: to take a couple of weeks off from their lives – which many of them loathe – and to find the time which they can’t back home to actually read a book cover to cover, to tan, to relax, to unwind. They’re not particularly receptive to questions about why they’re here and what they think of their normal lives– for the perfectly understandable reason that they didn’t come all this way to be reminded of the mediocrity of their day-to-day lives relative to this snatched glimpse of perfection. Nevertheless, they’re unhappy people having a happy time. And you can see, beneath their newly-rested eyes and leather-tanned faces, a wistful dream; a wonderment at what life would be like were they to pack in their jobs as brokers or attorneys or civil engineers or media consultants and move to a place like this and open a bar. I’m not saying they should at all. Someone back home needs to do those jobs and if everyone opened a bar in Paradise then Paradise would no longer be Paradise and the developed world would become unbearably bottom-heavy. I’m just saying, I’ve met a few people who did pack it all in, I’ve met them in rural India and in Nepal and in the Swiss alps and here, and they’re the happiest people I’ve ever come across. So the overworked white people escaping their lives for a couple of weeks are the first group.

The second group of tourists here are people like me. Young, educated and well-travelled, we share some common traits. First, they (we) generally seem themselves as citizens of the world above citizens of their home countries. They’re well-informed, critical of certain aspects of their places of origin, but proud nevertheless to be from where they’re from. Many are on long trips on a budget, most have recently finished university, almost all have an unquenchable longing to learn more about people, and absolutely all are unsure about their futures. Uncertain about career prospects following their overpriced degrees, afraid of the mid-life crises their parents and their parents’ friends are going through, and lucky enough to be living in a time which allows one to affordably explore the world with relative ease and safety, they’ve packed their bags with no set itinerary and gone wandering in the hope that it’ll clear the mind and rejuvenate the soul. Let me just say this to anyone considering becoming a member of this diaspora: for the most part, they do find what they’re looking for. And although when they return home their lives may end up quite different from what they’d expected before they left, crucially the process of travel exorcises demons and purges fears. If you can backpack solo around the world, no job interview or rent payment or cut-throat job market will upset you again, because you’ve pushed and tested yourself to breaking point. You’ve been scared and lonely at times; jubilant and meditative at others. And for all the times in between, you’ve explored – and exploration is in Man’s blood, it always has been and always will be. What I’m saying – and what any member of this second group will say to you if you ask – is that travel is an end in itself. Apologies for the cliché, but it’s the journey and not the destination which matters, and quenching the thirst for exploration and discovery that some people have is salubrious. It makes you stronger and better.

Not everyone has the desire, that’s for sure. For some people, weekend trips to four-star hotels with guidebook sightseeing thrown in is enough. And that’s fine – I’m not a travel snob, I’m really not. But I knew long ago that mine was a lust which could never be sated without great distance, massive challenges and countless people with which to share stories, find real affection, and generally allow your life to intertwine – however briefly – with their own.

So those are the two types of people that – for the most part – you find on a Thai island. The travellers that you come across in Kathmandu are of a different kind altogether. Just as are the tourists in Rome, the adventure zealots jumping off bridges in New Zealand, or those in pain and confusion seeking enlightenment through Buddhism or Hinduism in India. What they all share, though, is, firstly, an acceptance that the pursuit of happiness – for them – cannot be undertaken by a quotidian cycle of rote banality, and, secondly, having the means to be able to go exploring. They are, we are, a lucky bunch.

But I said I’d write what I’ve concluded thus far about the nature of happiness. And please accept it not merely with the caveat I outlined above, but also the footnote that this trip of mine is far from over – so any conclusions are preliminary.

My beginning hypothesis seems right. This is bad news because I was hoping to be wrong. The hypothesis – and it was a tentative one at that – is that there are broadly two types of people, notwithstanding the ‘self’ through which each individual’s identity is filtered.

Group One is the majority. They (and alas I include myself in this) are those who, while not depressed, discover early on –usually in adolescence – that happiness comes in excruciatingly small pockets to those who try for it. They spend their adolescence trying to figure out what those pockets are, and every single moment after that trying to maximise both these pockets’ frequency and their duration. The component of individuality or self is the variable that adjusts merely the nature of those experiences which comprise the pockets of happiness. But the pursuit is constant and everyone in this first group does it. All the time.

It may come in the form of pizza with an old friend who you haven’t seen in ages. It may be a night spent dancing sweatily in a club. It might be scoring a goal in the game's final minute for your team, or a cup of coffee in the morning, or a compliment from your boss; a hot bath or a good book or an orgasm. Most people have a bunch of these things which matter to them, and some come about – thankfully – on a daily basis. These are the events, the exquisite pockets of happiness, which act as counterweights to a tedious commute, a stressful day at work, household chores or chronic pain. These are the things we find ourselves living for, and if they were taken away, little would be left. Think about your own little pockets, the things which give you that embalming warmth and satisfaction, then take them all away from your life and ask if you could ever get up in the morning again. What would life be without sport or sex or good food or music or the feeling of scalding hot water on your back in the morning? What’d be left if you took away the smell of garlic or flowers, or a strange woman’s perfume on the breeze, or could never hear your favourite song ever again or catch up with old friends and share anecdotes, aspirations and advice? Right now, for me, it’s the feeling of hot sand between my toes and the smell of salt from the sea. I grew up on the beach in Australia and not a day passes when I don’t miss some of those formative, visceral sensations – we all have them; the jagged pieces of our childhood which slot into the jigsaw puzzle we’ve become.

And the feeling you get – as I delightfully happen to have now – when you meet someone, you like them immediately, you spend time together and then realise they like you back. And it’s the exquisite perfection of the wait for the first holding of hands, the first kiss, the first touch of your finger on their skin and the way your own is galvanised, electrified, as you do. As I said, I’m convinced that we each have, we each know the things we live for, the only variables are what those things are and how adept we are at manipulating our lives to experience them as often as we can.

This group of people, us, we’re the majority. And without those little pockets of exquisiteness, we’d all kill ourselves. Not to worry; it’s hard to imagine all these things being taken away at once. But it’s sobering, I think, just how dependent we are on the externalities of life for our happiness. I guess hedonism is the word for it, but I feel it’s more than the mere pursuit and acquisition of pleasure. It’s about filling the ennui of your life with happinesses like a builder plugs a hole in a wall. Without it, it can all crumble around you.

Group Two – and I’m sure you know where I’m going with this – is a small minority. Having successfully thrown aside dependence on the externalities, they have (cliché alert) ‘inner peace’. Able to find happiness in life per se, they can have life's component parts systematically taken away from them, and nevertheless be satisfied with nothing more than the fact that – right here and right now – they are alive. And it’s wonderful. I’ve met a few of these remarkable souls on my travels already. You may remember the wandering Dutchman in Sarajevo I wrote about, who’d sold all his stuff, hopped on his bicycle sixteen months earlier and was happily just riding about, alone, with nothing but his bike and his thoughts. I’ve met few happier and more centred people than him. There was a Nepalese guide – dirt poor, of course – who was disinterested in money and got everything he needed in life from being in and around the jungle. And the woman in Varanasi who kindly gave me her time to explain the ins and outs of Indian culture and the role of Hinduism. You could take away her job, her clothes, ever her friends and family I think, and she’d still be happy. And the protagonist in an otherwise excrementally bad book I’m reading at the moment called The Monk who Sold his Ferrari. Although the writing is something of which a lovesick schoolgirl would be ashamed – so much so that I’m moved to tear out the pages when I next run out of toilet paper – the protagonist has abandoned the stress and materialism of life as a lawyer to seek spiritual enlightenment among a group of monks in India. He has, in other words, successfully moved from Group One to Group Two.

This is what I’m rather long-windedly getting at. Many of the young wanderers whose paths you cross as you traipse the globe are people who’ve come to the same conclusions I have. Although not depressed, they acknowledge how dependent they are on the little pockets, the externalities I described above. And what they/we share is a determination – if not to cross from Group One to Group Two (after all, a life of meditation and poverty isn’t for everyone) – to at least learn something about the latter group and, in doing so, pursue less the little, isolated pockets of happiness on which they are so dependent back home, and gain a renewed love of life itself.

Which brings me back to Pong and the Trader. Irrespective of the fact it’s just a parable, I really don’t know whether Pong is in the enlightened minority or not. One assumes that if his lovemaking, guitar playing, wine and the rest were taken away from him, he’d suffer just as would we. It’s not that he’s enlightened, he just has some perspective about the relative importance of work and play. But it’s a parable worth recounting both to the middle-aged and jaded European lizards sprawling prostrate on the sand next to me right now and to the people who set me on this journey in the first place: the miserable, materialistic and overworked businesspeople in the City of London – with and for whom I’ve worked for the past couple of years – and whom I am desperate never to become. They don’t need to sell their Ferraris and move to India. They don’t need to give up coffee or restaurants or kissing or tennis. They just need to remember that the only externality that really matters is family and friends. The rest of it is just stuff. And there are plenty of people around the world who are perfectly happy without it.