HAPPY EVER AFTER TVB 01 HOW TO

Earning less than ВЈ400 per week (or about ВЈ20,000 a year) is one of the factors that increases the chances of being in the most miserable 1%. This would scale up to about half a million Britons. To be happier we need to move from a culture of вЂњmore pleaseвЂќ to one of вЂњjust enoughвЂќ.ДЄccording to the UKвЂ™s Office for National Statistics (ONS), which has been studying the happiness levels of a sample of 200,000 people each year from 2011, about 1% of us are miserable. The trap comes from the fact that the happiness hit from adherence to these narratives gets ever smaller the further up the ladder you go and, eventually, can become reversed. The assumption is that ever more happiness is achieved with ever more money and more markers of success. The narratives suggest, however, that no matter how much we have of each, we are expected to be reaching for more.

Now, it should be obvious that the absence of either of these two things can cause anxiety and misery. The stories around wealth and success, in particular, are social narratives that we canвЂ™t seem to get enough of. They become what I refer to as narrative traps, which together form the myth of the perfect life. His behaviour and his reaction to me demonstrate just one way in which these stories can harm us and the people around us. Not only do we want to fit in, but we can also, like my festival friend, get angry with those who do not.

HAPPY EVER AFTER TVB 01 HOW TO

By looking to the narrative for clues about how to live, we are provided with a coherent path to follow. As well as satisfying some of our innate desires, such narratives have developed rules of thought and action that help to make a complicated world easier to navigate. They have been shaped by power structures, cultures, laws, families, the media, historical practice and even evolutionary advantage. This social narrative and others like it have withstood generations of change. In doing so, he was appealing to a social narrative that places the burden on me to act in a particular way based upon my middle-class profession. This man was insistent that, in my role as a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I ought to be setting a вЂњbetterвЂќ example to those who looked up to me. In these circumstances, the evidence shows that it does more good than harm, so the idea that swearing is bad is a fucking stupid one.Д«ut I digress. Swearing is only ever harmful when it is used in an aggressive or abusive way, and not when used as a means of conveying excitement and emphasis. Why shouldnвЂ™t I swear? Perhaps because it is a sign of a poor vocabulary and/or low intelligence, and yet no such correlations have ever been found. He told me that I should not swear: apparently I used the word вЂњfuckвЂќ twice in an hour-long panel discussion. The man proceeded to lecture me on how вЂњwhen you reach a certain level you have to modify your behaviourвЂќ. Ordinarily, I would embrace being a hero of any kind but, in this context, I was made to feel like an arsehole. Then he asked, pointedly: вЂњBut why do you have to play the working-class hero? You do it in your book and, look at you, youвЂ™re doing it now.вЂќ Our interaction started with him saying how much he liked my first book, Happiness By Design.

Walking across the field to get some food, I was approached by a man in his 50s. A couple of years ago, I took part in an interesting panel discussion on вЂњemotion versus reasonвЂќ at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in Hay-on-Wye. ItвЂ™s about a working-class kid who becomes a university professor and who is expected to change his behaviour in accordance with a (harmful) narrative about how academics ought to behave. Since weвЂ™re talking about stories, letвЂ™s start with an experience of mine. As such, many of these stories end up creating a kind of social dissonance whereby, perversely, they cause more harm than good. But they are, at their heart, stories вЂ“ and ones that may not have originated with present-day people in mind. These social narratives can make our lives easier, by providing guidelines for behaviour, and they might sometimes make us happier, too. We are expected to be ambitious to want to be wealthy, successful and well educated to get married, be monogamous and have kids. T here are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives.

Happy ever after tvb 01