Malcolm Fraser was a pretty uninspiring Prime Minister. Most of us remember him for two things.

Firstly he was once discovered wandering around in the foyer of a hotel in the USA in his underpants!

Secondly, and somewhat more profound, he once proclaimed that, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.”

Whether he was aware of it or not, Fraser was channelling the thought of American psychiatrist and bestselling author, M Scott Peck. Peck, in his lovely little book, The Road Less Travelled, wrote

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, once we truly understand and accept it, then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

So from this point of view it seems inevitable that, no matter who you are, we all are fated to endure life’s travails.

Like every other living organism, the greatest challenge for humans is survival.  When we reflect on this, happiness is just a second order consideration. Indeed some of our instincts that aid survival, like fear and pessimism, are an anathema to happiness.

In the mid-twentieth century, as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith described in his influential book The Affluent Society, in an increasingly materialist society, firms began to change their modus operandi from trying to meet consumer demand to effectively acting to increase consumer demand. As a result we created a whole new advertising industry that tried to convince consumers that their wellbeing and therefore their happiness could be enhanced by purchasing more, and particularly more fashionable products. This philosophy prospered under the assumption that happiness was correlated with material consumption.

But we know from many studies that long-term happiness is not directly correlated to wealth and material consumption. For example most people who win the lotto get an instantaneous hit of joyfulness, but within twelve months they are no happier than they were before their serendipitous windfall!

No doubt it is a natural instinct that we should seek to attain happiness’ Indeed in the United States the constitution puts great store in “the pursuit of happiness”. It conjures up the image that somewhere out there our happiness is accessible to us if we only we were agile enough to run it down!

Now in our pursuit of happiness there are a number of traps.

Firstly what do we think it means to be happy?

If you assume that a happy life is one full of euphoria, laughter and joy, you will undoubtedly be disappointed! It is a grossly unreal expectation to assume a life where you are forever on a high

It seems to me sufficient to seek a life which is mainly defined by contentment and equanimity. This is a life of inner peace.

The second trap, I have already hinted at, is that happiness can be attained through materialistic consumption.

The third trap is a corollary of the second. And that is the belief that happiness can be attained from the exterior world.

As I have explained many times the defining characteristic of our humanity seems to be that we are self-aware. This is a reflection of human consciousness. Because of this, not only can we think but we are aware of our thoughts. This creates what we might call our “theatre of mind”. As a result we have to contend both with an external physical world (the world out there) and an internal consciousness derived world (the world in here). Again, as I have often explained our psychological wellbeing is largely determined by the state of this internal world.

I have written about this so many times that I won’t bore you with repeating these arguments.

But there is a further factor we need to consider when trying to understand different human experiences. This factor is our innate disposition. Human beings display a wide range of automatic, largely unconscious responses to their personal circumstances.

Consequently many of us are imbued with a melancholic disposition and are not inclined to demonstrate the normal traits most of us associate with happiness. And we need to be very careful here. In the last century or so we have been inclined to want to medicalise behavioural traits that are a little removed from the population norm. We do this even when such traits are not outliers on the normal distribution.

This concept emboldened a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry. Every minor mood disorder became a target for a pharmaceutical solution. Drugs such as Prozac, Valium and Ritalin were frequently prescribed for the mildest mood aberration. Minor perturbations that people once took in their stride now became mental illnesses.

Consequently in Western countries mental illness accounts for a third of all disability claims.

In their 2007 book, The Loss of Sadness American psychologists Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield argue that modern psychiatry has stretched the definition of mental illness so far that everyday emotional pain now qualifies as clinical pathology. The authors wrote;

The boundaries between normal distress and disorder have become so porous that everyday emotions are increasingly being treated as mental illness.

So where does this leave us? I personally don’t believe the pursuit of happiness is something we should consciously pursue. When it comes to individuals with different dispositions it seems to me that happiness is a very elusive construct.

The pursuit of happiness? I think that is fruitless. Happiness, or perhaps as I asserted above, contentment, is an unintended consequence of living a meaningful and purposeful life! Believing that happiness is a natural and expected human state merely adds to our discontent!