Getting back to ‘where we were’ will not make us a happier nation

THE name of the company is irrelevant. It’s a big one with systems.

One of the systems requires it, every three years, to do a communications audit of its workforce, to find out if they feel “nobody ever tells us anything” or, contrariwise, if they believe the management informs them clearly when they need informing about developments impending within the company.

During the presentation of the latest audit, up they went, the PowerPoint slides, one after another, showing that, in the main, the company’s communications was somewhat better, on all fronts, than it had been in 2008. Then came the bar chart measuring complaints made by members of the sales force. The contrast was startling. The bar showing the level of complaints went almost to the top of the chart, three years ago, and had more than halved since then.

No radical change had been made to the working conditions of the sales force. Neither had major advances been made in their training or supervision. Yet complaints had virtually died away.

The HR manager had been sufficiently intrigued by the contrast to probe it a little. She found that, three years ago, typical complaints from the sales people involved cars (other companies in the same sector provided their sales people with better vehicles), meal allowances (compared with peer employers, this company was somewhat frugal) and targets (the sales guys, three years ago, believed they were under much more pressure to deliver the numbers than were pals working elsewhere in the same industry).

The HR manager found minor equalisers had taken place in the intervening years. A couple of competitor companies had slightly reduced allowances and one had raised targets. But those differences could not explain the scale of the drop-off in complaints. A little extra qualitative research revealed what should, in retrospect, have been pretty obvious: The sales people, watching stories about closures and redundancies featuring every night on the TV news, experienced that rare emotion: Gratitude. They were grateful they still had a good job and were not minded, as they might have been before, to moan about the peripheral irritations attached to that job.

In human resources-speak, they had enhanced their coping skills. In ordinary human speak, they had learned to shut up and like their job more. Because that’s the odd pattern: Where people express anger (by, for example, complaining about their workplace) peace does not come dropping slow on them as a result. Instead, they get angrier and more discontented. The problem is that buttoning your lip and getting on with it can seem like slave behaviour, whereas complaint often has an emotional payoff.

Driven by the needs of mass media over the past 20 years, the vocal victim has become a hero figure. Those who don’t buy into victimhood remain silent when it’s on display. Take a recent Joe Duffy Liveline programme, where members of the audience at a theatrical show complained that Magic Mindy or Psychic Sally or some other star was being fed details about “cases” she was spotting in the audience, which — if true — meant she was gifted with a good hearing device, rather than with the capacity to communicate with the dead. The “victims” were all aghast. Not all the listeners would have sympathised that much with them, yet nobody rang the programme to say “Does it not strike you as odd to believe that your beloved Granny, God rest her, is going to leave Heaven or wherever you believe she is, to turn up, spectrally, on a public stage, to talk to you through a total stranger at a considerable cost to you, when she could appear in your dreams or even your kitchen and not cost you a cent?”

No doubt a fair few of the new poor, hearing that programme while they tried to figure out if their family could survive on cornflakes the following week, thought that being distraught over a (possibly) wired psychic just a little disproportionate. They have to cope, they’d have thought, why do people challenged in such a minor way not cope without public sympathy?

An instructive study of the contrast between those who, in the face of trauma, cope and surmount their challenges and those who don’t was conducted a couple of years ago, interrogating people who had come through horrific experiences, ranging from political torture to rape at gunpoint. The British psychiatrist Raj Persaud, commenting on the fact that few of them suffered significant ongoing psychological difficulties, listed recurring themes in the lives of the successful survivors

“First, they did not dwell on the trauma,” he said. “Secondly, they lived a hard-working, productive life characterised by self-determination and self-reliance. Thirdly, they accepted and learned from the traumatic experience and faced life’s future challenges, and finally, they had ‘biological endurance’ due to their physical health.”

I suspect that another characteristic of those currently coping with drastically reduced circumstances is a lack of what’s officially called “status anxiety” but which used to be called “keeping up with the Joneses”. Status anxiety took over this country with the arrival of the Celtic Tiger, and may have contributed, not to happiness, but to the loss of happiness.

Over the past 50 years — and not just in Ireland — the lifestyle graph has gone up. Bigger incomes, longer life-spans, larger homes, more phone calls, holidays, university degrees. Furthermore, as Harvard professor Stephen Pinker writes, we’ve been living in less violent times: “Today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”

In theory, then, the question apocryphally asked about indecently rich and successful people, “But are they happy?” should be answered with a resounding affirmative. In reality, during the years in which we became better off, the happiness index increased not a bit. One American writer, Gregg Easterbrook, calls this “The Progress Paradox”.

“The trend line for happiness has been flat for 50 years,” he says. “The trend line is negative for the number of people who consider themselves ‘very happy’, that percentage gradually declining since the 1940s. And the trend line would cascade downward like water over a falls on the topic of avoiding depression. Adjusting for population growth, 10 times as many people in the Western nations today suffer from ‘unipolar’ depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific cause, than did half a century ago. Americans and Europeans have ever more of everything except happiness.”

The regnant idea at the moment, however, is that we can all expect to be unhappy until we get back to where we were. That idea needs challenge on two fronts.

Firstly, long before Bill Clinton told us to put our game face on, people in this country facing dire challenges have responded with courage, energy and resilience. Secondly, even if we were unwise enough to assume that we may get back to where we were, financially, the chances that the happiness line on the graph will go up in parallel are slim.

Sadly, the chances are that when — or if — we come out of the cornflake years, the first thing we’ll do is complain.