In this field of personal development, we get so many notions of happiness and how best to get it delivered our way, don’t we? Is everyone just a happiness addict?

Ok, so what is it with Culture? Not the stuff that anthropologists refer to, but Culture-with-a-capital-C… I keep being told by my mentors, peers and especially wealthy friends that I need more of it…

You know, Culture… All that stuff like paintings, poetry, opera, literature, music, drama, and sculpture. According to many, these are the ingredients of refinement and things that make us happy. I am not convinced that happiness is not just an addiction of sorts…

I like the telly. I am enthralled by the latest series of Lost, I get giddy with excitement at the latest season of 24, I have been known to go to Sci-Fi conventions, I could watch football non-stop for many hours… But this does not fall into the category of what proper, happiness-inducing Culture is supposed to be!? That is not my argument today, excuse me, I am not going to defend sci-fi TV shows today…

Just what is the relation of Culture to human happiness? Why is it so heavily espoused by so many people that we need to do these things to be happy? I am sure that we are happy when we enjoy things that fall into the category of Culture… But what is happiness? This is what I’d like to look at today, because I can’t stand people telling me what things should and should equate to my own happiness, let me explain my recent retort to those telling me I need more Culture…

So if we look at happiness through the ages, it has often meant two contrasting things.

If you look back to classical and medieval times… Basically, you were happy if nothing bad happened to you, as simple as that. Pursuing happiness was often as simple as avoiding bad stuff. In this view, life tended to consist of what the world or what life, did to you. If more good things than bad happened, you were happy.

In his book Happiness: A History, the happiness historian (what a cool job title) Darrin McMahon writes:

In virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.

Dutch, for example, uses the same word “geluk” for both happiness and luck. In English, “hap” or “heppe” appeared in Middle English in the thirteenth century, meaning chance, fortune, “an event that befalls one.” It survives in our words “perhaps,” “hapless,” “haphazard,” “happenstance,” “haphazard,” and, especially, “happiness.”

Maybe Freud’s idea of returning his patients to ordinary unhappiness instead of neurotic unhappiness has something in common with this older, tragic view of happiness.

In the modern world, well since the eighteenth century or so, happiness has become psychologised, hasn’t it? Since many brilliant minds like Locke and Jefferson and Adam Smith, we started considering happiness to be a state of mind… That is how we now think, isn;t it?

So because happiness is a state of mind, it is then believed that you can attempt to achieve happiness by your own efforts! Ah-ha!

This is the cornerstone of much of Western civilisation today, isn;t it? Us of the free world thinking that we are all entitled as our birthright to the pursuit of happiness… On our own terms though, surely?!

You see, to me, both these views make some sense, well a lot of sense depending on how I consider them…

BUUUT… As far as Culture-with-a-capital-C is concerned, it is the second that matters. When we create or re-create poems, plays, films, art, music, or photographs, we are pursuing happiness. We are pursuing a certain state of mind. And how do we pursue it?

Think of a laboratory rat in a cage. I am sorry to have you thinking of that, but just to illustrate this point… Say for example, this rat is supposed to spin its treadmill once, then push a lever three times which delivers a little sugar water.

And so the clever rat spins the treadmill and pushes the lever three times, and the rat gets some sugar water, and the rat spins the treadmill and pushes the lever three times, and the rat gets some sugar water, and the rat spins the treadmill and pushes-and so on. Is that a happy rat? Yes! Believe it or not, rats actually look pleased when given sweet things to taste, and according to their work The Neural Basis of Drug Craving: An Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction Robinson and Berridge, the rat gives the equivalent of a disgusted look in response to bitterness! Haha!

How do we know this is a happy rat? Because it keeps on. It spins the treadmill and pushes the lever five times and gets the sugar water and it spins the treadmill and pushes-it keeps on doing it.

It keeps on doing it-that’s exactly what we do with Culture-with-a-capital-C. We keep on going to theatres, reading books, taking photographs, going to galleries and museums and concerts… The same as I derive from watching the TV and enjoying sports and reading hypnosis books… The same that I derive from walks along the beach with my wife and spending time tending to my beautiful garden (my cherry trees are going blossom soon — yippee!)…

We must be getting the same shot of pleasure as the laboratory rat. For both of us, that shot of pleasure is something that occurs in our brains.

Isn’t this just a cycle of addiction of sorts? I have not even gone into discussions on withdrawal and seeking further fixes or shots…

Just a thought… Just a reply I sent to my peers this week telling me to invest more of my wealth in Culture… Pah, I do the things I like doing, thank you very much…