We all want to live a happy life. But what do we think of when we think of our own happiness? If asked, most of us would talk about having loving and supportive relationships with family and friends, and of having fulfilling and stimulating work, whether paid or unpaid.
Yet in today’s society, dominated by the techniques of marketing and the culture of consumption, we are being persuaded to think of our happiness in a quite different way — as the gratification of our desires. We can be happy by maximising the number of physical and emotional highs and limiting the lows. Increasingly, we think we can find happiness by buying new clothes or a new car, by getting a pay rise, or by taking some drugs that lift our mood or by having better sex.
Enormous resources are devoted to persuading us that gratification of our desires is the path to happiness. The culture of marketing, while designed to sell us particular products, also contains a deeper and rather insidious message — that money and what it buys is the key to the good life.
But the truth is that seeking to gratify our desires can never be the path to happiness. If it were, then we could all take happiness pills and float through life on a cloud of euphoria. So the promises of the consumer society are false. Although we are told that having more money and consuming more will make us happy, the truth is that this sort of society can reproduce itself each day only by making us feel dissatisfied with what we have. It has to make us feel deprived and restless and always yearning for more. In this way it creates new wants for the next thing — a plasma TV, a bigger house, a better-paying job. In such a society our happiness depends on us being made to feel unhappy.
Actually, this idea is not peculiar to those living in modern consumer society, but applies to everyone who stakes his or her happiness on superficial notions of gratification. At around 50 years of age, Leo Tolstoy was at the height of his career. He wrote that, by any conventional measure, his fame, family life and success should have made him "completely happy". Yet he confessed that his life had become flat and without meaning. "I felt", he wrote, "that something had broken