The happiness lie. Each morning I watch grey-faced youngsters trudge off to work in corporate zombieland and think this. The biggest disservice my generation has done the 20-somethings isn't making inner cities hip and unaffordable. It's not even wrecking the planet and leaving them to deal.
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God knows those things are calamitous enough. But more dangerous still is the expectation we've somehow spliced into their psychic DNA that happiness is the natural and expectable condition of human life. This alone makes for misery. Take three appetites: credit, food and booze. A recent study of credit habits found that the 14.1 per cent of Australians with five or more credit card enquiries on file (an indicator of likely debt-burden) increased to 20.3 per cent amongst 25-34 year olds.
Another recent study shows that while an astounding 62 per cent of Australian women show poor eating and exercise habits, that figure increases to 72 per cent for women aged 16-24. As to alcohol, almost one-fifth (18.2 per cent) of Australians over 14 drink at levels that risk alcohol-related harm over their lifetime.
Wherever you look, the generation that has been lullabied with promises of "immortality in your lifetime" is doing its utmost to reduce life expectancy for the first time in centuries. That has to be interesting.
So much of wanting depends on not-having. So much of the pleasure is in the anticipation, so much of the satisfaction in the instant of acquisition. After that, it's downhill. You're stuck with the extra volume at your waist, on your shelf or in your bed.
But that's still only the tip of the complications. Because most of what we want we don't actually want at all. Mostly, what we really want is not the object itself but the envy it'll generate.
Most desires are really about status. This is why modesty was a virtue; not to engender shame, but because banning ostentation put the brakes on so many deadly sins – envy, gluttony, avarice, pride.
Public show is now so much more important than private fact that pride and avarice have become virtues, and modesty a sin.
Philosopher-medic Raymond Tallis ranks humanity's four hungers: one, basic hunger for food and shelter; two, hunger for pleasure; three, for approval and status. And four, the highest hunger, for art, spirit and purpose. The verticality of this is interesting. As with the Buddhist chakras, it's almost impossible not to see higher as better – as though a kind of moral gravity were at play. As though fighting it were the work.
And so it is. Feeding lower hungers satisfies momentarily. They are the high GI appetites. But lasting happiness requires us to sate the fourth hunger, the hunger for meaning.
This is what we've failed to tell the kids. Happiness can't be chased. It doesn't come from getting what you want, satisfying desires, accumulating leisure or pleasure or stuff. It isn't a right or a deliverable. And being sad is not a sin.
Happiness is an occasional by-product of purposeful engagement in a greater cause. It's work. And if we're lucky, we can make it our work. This is why Plato made philosophy the most blessed of vocations.
Perpetuating infantile appetites cannot bring happiness. Individuals, like cultures, need to evolve through the hungers until meaning – happiness – emerges. So it's not just better for the world if you can abandon the grim pursuit of career outcomes and align your work with your beliefs. It's also much, much better for you.
