Happy times aren't always pleasant times
I got a few condescending chuckles in an editorial board meeting last week when I mentioned that a newly published survey on happiness was just "reinventing the wheel."
You have to understand, I have a reputation as the dour Scandinavian on the board, the one who finds overcast days uplifting and who likes to curl up with a good Bergman movie. They thought this was just another example of me putting a wobbly spin on a feel-good story. But that wasn't it at all.
The survey was indeed good news. It's just that the modern world seems to spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to scientifically determine what happiness is. All people need to do is remember what their mothers, or perhaps their grandmothers, told them.
My mom spent her teenage years under Nazi occupation in Norway. That was a most unpleasant experience. Her father, my grandfather, was a member of the underground forces fighting the occupiers, which meant he and his family lived with constant anxiety.
Were they unhappy? With their circumstances, yes. But I don't remember my mother telling us stories about how unhappy she was during those years.
She told plenty of stories. One of my favorites had to do with a time when the family finally had gotten some meat and decided to stage a good Sunday dinner, a rarity during those years. They set an elaborate table. They prepared the food. They took it out of the oven and were carrying it into the dining room when an explosion in the nearby harbor rocked their apartment building, sent windows cascading inward and soot raining down on the food.
Not to be denied, they scraped and cleaned the food and the floor as best they could and decided to try again, only to be foiled by another explosion.
Good times? Hardly, but the story always was told with amusement — laughter, even. Sure, the passage of time changes a lot of things. But the underlying point of all her war stories was that she was together with her family and they knew they could pull through anything together. That, and her religious faith, kept her happy despite it all. If she'd waited for circumstances to make her happy, she would have been in for a long wait.
No doubt, a lot of parents who survived the Depression and war in this country passed on similar lessons.
And that, apparently, is something today's young people inherently understand. The happiness poll, conducted by the Associated Press and MTV, interviewed 1,280 Americans between the ages of 13 and 24. Two-thirds of them said they generally are at least somewhat happy, and another 16 percent said they were somewhere between happy and unhappy.
But when asked to identify the one thing that makes them most happy, the largest group, 20 percent, said spending time with family, followed closely by the 15 percent who said spending time with friends.
Only 36 percent said the amount of money they had made them happy. And moms and dads may be surprised to learn that 42 percent said they were made at least somewhat happy by socializing online, whereas 72 percent said they were made happy by their relationship with their parents. Most of them understand that money doesn't buy happiness, but they acknowledge that having enough of it is important. That sounds about right.
Even in a consumer-driven world where the senses are bombarded by images of the rich and famous, kids seem to get it. They don't need to be told how to make a wheel. And that was my point.
A lot of similar studies have reached the same basic conclusions. One, headed by a professor at New York's Stony Brook University, found that money doesn't make people happy, but that it increases stress levels and inhibits the ability to relax. Another, by the Pew Research Center, found that conservatives are happier than liberals, but that was taken before Congress changed hands this year.
But my favorite one involved 80,000 people worldwide. It found that the happiest people on earth are the Danes.
No one seems to know why, least of all the folks in Copenhagen, where it's cloudy and dark much of the year. But something about it appeals to my Scandinavian instincts.
Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com