How To Hack Happiness

Andrew Zaleski Discovers How To #bringthejoyback.

- Andrew Zaleski

Despite all the meditation lunches, CBD elixirs, trigger warnings and caffeinated chocolates, South Africans aren’t getting any happier. According to the World Happiness Report, there has been a steep decline in South Africans’ overall life satisfaction and happiness in the last decade. This year’s report showed we placed 106 out of 156 countries. We’re an increasingly bummed-out bunch, and to make matters worse,“ we live in a culture that is just obsessed with happiness,” says Dr Darrin McMahon, the author of Happiness: A History.

And we should be obsessed with it: a positive outlook has been linked to a longer life, better health and, it goes without saying, greater well-being. At the end of the 17th century, McMahon explains, “people started to say, ‘Look, we don’t have to suffer a long, menial existence.’ ”Except lately we’ve been coming at the whole happiness thing from the wrong angle. Getting it right – owning your well-deserved piece of it – means understanding why we’re a nation of malcontents.

WHY WE’RE NOT HAPPY

1. THE STUFF WE THINK MAKES US HAPPY DOESN’T MAKE US HAPPY. South Africa’s happiness-industrial complex is in a large way serving up the wrong thing.