Unhappy? What a luxury

Rob Stephenson is trying to produce a sonic representation of joy. He’s DJing on stage at the World Happiness Summit in London, pumping out a kick drum at 124bpm. The sound represents the subliminal satisfaction you get from a walk round the park, Rob says. He adds bongos and the dinging noise of a triangle to the track – acoustic equivalents of proper sleep and good nutrition. ‘Can you feel it?’ Rob asks. ‘Can you feel it?’ More inexplicable sound is layered – the melody from ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay, the riff from ‘Seven Nation Army’ by the White Stripes – and Rob starts gyrating at his decks in aural ecstasy. The crowd dance and raise their hands to the roof. They close their eyes and smile.

The summit is an annual get-together for joy junkies – people obsessed with trying to make the world a cheerier place. Last year they met in Lake Como, the year before in Miami, and now they’re in a conference hall on the South Bank of the River Thames. For a couple days they dance and chant and meditate and listen to lectures on wellbeing and mindfulness, as they try to learn the newest ways to become happy. ‘It’s insightful, inspirational,’ says Miguel, who works in hospitality. (‘I lead a team – I serve a team – of six,’ he says.) ‘I’m here to find my purpose. Just to find my groove. Find my flow. That’s why I’m here.’

The happiness business is just the newest incarnation of a decades-old western addiction to self-care. Dr John Travis opened America’s first ‘wellness centre’ in the 1970s. ‘It’s recognising that there’s more to life than the absence of sickness’, he told 60 Minutes. Jon Kabat-Zinn made a career in the 1990s spreading mindfulness techniques he learnt from Buddhists. He wrote bestselling books like Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are. The writer Tom Wolfe said the luxury of ‘dwelling on the self’ was a side effect of America’s mid-century economic success: people became rich enough to worry about the meaning of their life.

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Outside the South Bank conference hall, Karen Guggenheim, who runs the happiness summit, says self-care today isn’t an indulgence like it used to be – it’s essential to coping in our insane world. Think about the pressures we put on our kids, she says:

Be yourself, be happy, but then again, get good grades, do this, do that. Make sure you shine in sports so you can get into the best universities and you can get the best job, and then you can get… and then you can… and then you can. The kids are like: ‘No.’ It’s too much. Too much pressure.

Western societies are now so sad that they’re reversing one of the foundations of behavioural economics. This year’s ‘World Happiness Report’, which ranks countries by measuring the satisfaction of their populations, came out a couple days ago. Britain’s under-30s are the 32nd happiest in the world, and our over-60s are 20th. In America, their under-30s rank 62nd, and their over-60s, 10th. Today, we enjoy life more as we get closer to death. ‘Youth, especially in North America, are experiencing a mid-life crisis,’ said Dr Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, who helped put the report together.

Faced with that terror, Karen is ‘awestricken’ by the success of her summit. ‘If you look at the standings from the World Happiness Report today, they’re quite bleak,’ she says. ‘So I’m excited, actually.’ You couldn’t deny it: the summit had hosted excellent sessions like ‘The Impact of Sense of Smell on Wellbeing’ and ‘Thriving in Today’s High-Speed Life’. But they were treating a crisis with a shtick. Earlier this year, a University of Oxford study said relaxation routines, lifestyle coaching and wellbeing apps make ‘no difference’ to happiness. A study on school children from 2022 found mindfulness techniques do not improve wellbeing.

Never mind. ‘Business executives have only just got their heads around diversity’, says Paul, who helped arrange press coverage for the summit. A new workplace revolution is coming; on LinkedIn, two-thousand people already have the job title ‘Chief Happiness Officer’. Paul picked up a free flat white outside the conference hall, and raised it to the barista: ‘To good health.’ We’re created sick, commanded to be sound.