Happiness and the caveman

There’s been a lot in the media recently about what makes people happy.

The government, and particularly the Prime Minister (UK) is driving the question and it seems to be causing a fair amount of controversy.

The argument goes thus:

Why are we fixated on the creation of wealth. The creation of wealth is assumed to make people happy… but what if it doesn’t. What if people are made happy by other things? Things like bank holidays and meals out. What if we’ve been concentrating on the wrong objective all these years.

One of the reasons the government is keen on this direction is so they can ask people what makes them happy, and in doing so make them think the government cares – it’s a good PR exercise. The other reason is that it seems to make some sense.

I was listening to some vox pops the other day on the lunchtime news, in which people were saying things like:

‘Lie ins make me happy’, ‘A good meal’, ‘My job’, ‘My family and friends’… etc etc.

What struck me was how like cave men (and women) they all sounded. None of the reasons cited were much different from those that might have been mustered by your average hole dweller (presumably with a few more ‘ugs’ (not the boot) and references to dry bear fur).

I mentioned this thought over breakfast today to find out that this has been known for years and that somehow I’d managed to overlook it. It was one of those theories you hear bandied around from time to time but never actually take the time to read. I subsequently read it.

So in a nutshell Maslow’s hierarchy of needs seems to tell us what we need to know:

Its good simple stuff and I am embarrassed to say I haven’t bothered to look into it before.

At the base you have your basic psychological stuff (Hunger, thirst etc) – these translate into ‘a nice meal makes me happy’, ‘I like a nice arm duvet’.

Then comes the safety stuff: ‘I like job security’, ‘I like a lie in’ (warm safe bed)…

Then there’s social needs: ‘I love my friends’, ‘I love my mobile phone’…

Then comes self esteem: ‘I like my job’, ‘I like being a good mum/dad’

Finally comes self actualisation: ‘I like completing things that make me feel good about myself’ (complex projects at work etc).

Essentially people climb the pyramid. Once you’ve achieved the bottom rung you move up to the second… etc. It all makes sense and explains quite a bit.

Now this is all pretty basic stuff and has moved on a bit since its conception (see ERG theory which allows you to be trying to achieve multiple levels of satisfaction at one time and blurs the boundaries between tiers), but you get my point.

There’s nothing new here. It’s just that no-one’s really bothered to think about it in policy terms before – oh and because it makes for good ‘honestly we are listening to your needs’ PR…

Two more thoughts I think I’ll come back to at some point:

1)      The rise of social networking, its fulfilment of the social need in the hierarchy and what this means for comm’s planning.

2)      A nice paragraph from the late great Douglas Adams – proving of course that there is nothing new here:

‘The planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.’