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By Root 1225 0

wrong to say money cannot buy happiness. On a broad level, personal happiness can be enhanced by things going from good to better: living in a beautiful, safe place; having enough to share; occupying a social position where you do not have to be bullied too often. There are a lot of caveats to the idea that wealth ensures these things, and wealth brings its own problems—familial dependency, worry if one’s personal worth matches one’s worth as a person. Still, there are obvious happiness advantages to having some money. That’s clearly true when we are talking about better food and medicine, but even with the already well off, more money can buffer you from many distinct pains. The difference between a phenomenal wheelchair and one that is just good enough is not trivial.

It is an old truism that happiness will not be explained in the treasury, but we regularly deny that with our actions. Money can buy some happiness. Consumerism, with its toys and its media and its work ethic, has stolen the midsize associations that long sustained human life, sending us all to our living rooms to eat dinner in front of the TV. But now we go to work and chat about television, and we meet each other at the shops or the mall. We communicate with each other in the symbolic associational meanings of our ever shifting wardrobes and possessions.

This chapter has concentrated on what wealth and abundance do for happiness. We used to be hounded by hunger. Indeed, eaten by the very hound of hunger: the wolf. We used to exist in three realms of society: the family, the local world, and the country. We have cut out a lot of that hunger, especially fear of being eaten on dry land, and we have cut out the demands of the local world. Happy changes, but they left us with a lot to make up for. Consumerism has become the culture’s central opportunity for public performance; for being someone; and for eating and feeding, rather than being eaten.

Bodies

You are not in your body. You are your body. Your brain seems to do most of the thinking, but there is a sense in which your body is one big system, with the various parts making choices all the time; growing, changing, fighting germs, resting. Most such decisions are unconscious; many are made on the cellular level. How you feel is the aggregate of this whole system. Nobody knows how it works.

But we do know that we can influence it. After a heavy meal we feel slow, after a run in the park we feel lively, a warm bath calms us, an orgasm gives us a glow of well-being. Such dramatic happiness effects have led people throughout history to conclude that happiness is respondent to diet, exercise, sex, and spa treatments.

As for the particulars, we have less certainty. There is only one consistent message in these health theories and their historical record of effectiveness: embracing a regimen can make you happier for a while. Such regimens are almost all sold as lifelong conversions, but for most of us, that is not how it really works. Which regimen you should choose is the question on everyone’s lips, but there is not much to go on. The actual choice of what you do about your diet, exercise, sex, and treatments is relatively arbitrary. Look at the track record of an assumption—for example, the idea that lifting weights can give you muscles. You may have had some brief weight-lifting experiences and found yourself unable to confirm this hypothesis, but casual evidence is so consistent that there is good reason to believe the correlation anyway. No such historical correlation exists between happiness and any given regime of diet, exercise, sex, and spa treatments. Again, what we can find consistent evidence for is that when people devote themselves to a regimen, they report happiness for a while. This happiness seems too strong a correlate to be attributable merely to a placebo effect; rather, the body responds to sharp changes in its habits.

The problem, of course, is that at any given historical moment, prevailing views about the right changes to make in how we care for our bodies can be bullying and