We’ve never had it so good. It’s just time we woke up and realised it

TO be happy, these days, is a huge social error. It defines you as shallow and without conscience.

It marks you as an outsider. You don't belong. You are a cringe-making modern leper carrying a small but serious threat of contagion; take that bell with you when you leave so you can warn innocent bystanders. Unclean, unclean, happy person here.

Delight with your daily realities, even contentment with your lot, is severely uncool.

Either you have been disgustingly lucky and have avoided bereavement, betrayal and failure (in which case you're just smug) or you've received your fair share of bereavement, betrayal and failure, in which case your continued happiness equates to stupidity or insensitivity.

Or even denial. (Denial means that you're not just a smiling pain in the ass, but slightly nuts, too).

Although happiness is an affront, it's OK to be in recovery. Or healing.

As this year's Christmas presents demonstrate. Half of them carry the word 'therapy' on the package. Yokes for pummelling the tension out of muscles are decorated with pictures of men, their eyes closed in relief as if they'd just got out of solitary confinement.

If hand-held tension-pummellers aren't enough, you can buy a whole chair purpose-built to vibrate the miseries of the day out of you.

Even the pleasure of a pleasant pong has been elevated to medical status by calling it Aromatherapy. Christmases long ago carried the lovely smells of Cusson's Apple Blossom Talc (bring it back, please) with pictures of sunny apple blossoms on the tin container.

Today, the scents aren't named after flowers, but after the therapeutic state they supposedly deliver: tranquility, stress-relief or calm. Givers have no difficulty presenting a gift that implies the recipient is barely coping with life.

The dominant cultural conception is of a generation victimised, put-upon, brutalised, deprived and engaged in a never-ending process of recovery or healing. Sales of anti-depressants, panic-assuagers and tranquillisers were never higher.

Half the handbags in the country contain little vials of Rescue Remedy, a herbal concoction designed for the otherwise insurmountable traumas of daily life.

Callers to phone-in programmes, explaining weekend binge-drinking, say "You hafta have a laugh", as if the rest of the week was spent in a salt-mine or an enclosed convent where a giggle would get you flogged by the Reverend Mother.

This dominant cultural conception is at odds with the facts. We're NOT traumatised, put-upon or victimised. In fact, to quote MacMillan: we have never had it so good.

Yet we're convinced we never had it so bad. On the first day of 2000, Bill Clinton remarked that Western society has "never before enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity, combined with so much social progress".

He was right in saying we have prosperity and social progress, but are we enjoying it?

No. All the evidence suggests that, while virtually all aspects of life in the West have improved, today's generation are no happier for being richer, healthier, living in better homes, having more education for their children and surviving to a longer, more active, e-mail-linked and better-supported old age.

This weekend, Colonel Gadaffi invited observers to witness him doing away with his weapons of mass destruction. It sounded like an armament-rich version of Little Christmas: come watch us disassemble the atomic bombs we decorated the place with.

With Saddam Hussein in custody looking like a rotted version of Ronnie Drew, that pretty much puts paid to any expectation of being killed in our beds before Christmas by an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a faulty sense of direction.

It certainly puts us way ahead of where we were during the Cold War, a mere three decades back.

Of course more progress needs to be made on a broad front. Of course there are threats out there. But like Dickens' Mrs Gummidge, we seem to have got into the habit of being more upset and worried about issues than they objectively demand, whether those issues are the environment (improving) or crime (lessening).

We've also lost the capacity to compare our situation, realistically, with that of our grandparents.

We sit seething in traffic jams, whingeing that it takes an hour to cover twelve miles, but forget we're in a nice warm car on a good road with dozens of radio programmes available to us, not to mention CDs and (if we pull in) the mobile phone.

Even our discomfort is a hell of a lot more comfortable than our grandparents would have experienced.

THIS unhappiness in the face of demonstrable improvement has been called the Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook, an American social commentator, who points out that throughout the United States and the European Union, the incidence of clinical melancholy has been rising in eerie synchronisation with rising prosperity.

"Adjusting for population growth," he says, "'unipolar' depression, the condition in which a person simply always feels blue, is today ten times as prevalent as it was half a century ago."

Our grandparents coped with a world where stepping on a rusty nail could kill through tetanus, where babies might die horrifically of diphtheria and where teenagers might contract TB and disappear into fever hospitals from which they might never emerge alive.

Smallpox was still maiming, polio still crippling within living memory.

Plus, the Grim Reaper was being selective along class lines: at the end of the nineteenth century, the average life span of the upper class at least in Britain was seventeen years longer than the working class. Today the difference in life expectancy between richest and poorest is a maximum of two years, on average.

As recently as a hundred years ago, the typical working class man was five inches shorter than his counterpart in the nobility because of poorer nutrition, healthcare and the burden of physical labour.

And was bandy-legged from rickets. Today, there's no difference in height between richer and poorer people, and most medical students today wouldn't know rickets if it presented itself to them.

Yes, we have AIDs, but AIDs has gone remarkably quickly from an horrific killer to a chronic illness capable of being managed indefinitely, albeit expensively.

Society now fights for the lives of those who a few decades ago would have been permitted to die quietly.

This increases medical expenditure, but we all accept it has an important social advance, just as we regard as a social advance schemes to facilitate people with disabilities to live independent contributory lives and the mainstream education of children with learning disabilities.

Our parents, if they happened to find themselves in an unhappy marriage, were stuck in it. Our children can separate, divorce and marry again. They get a second chance at happiness. Or a third. Similarly, gay men no longer face the possibility of appearing in court for expressing their sexuality.

Yet we are not happy. Uncomplicated happiness is so rare that when it surfaces, it irritates the hell out of us. To be emotionally convalescent seems to be about the best we can aim at.

Contentment is a step too far. Happiness, today, is positioned as a pig-ignorant ignoring of painful realities, where it should be the grateful appreciation of obvious progress.

Only one day of the year still carries an expectation of sweetness and light. It's coming up this Thursday. Don't miss it.