Scale of Happiness

In the Sunday Times Dan Buettner, the author of the book "Thrive, Finding Happiness The Blue Zones Way" placed Singapore as the happiest city in Asia. Of course the criteria in assessing happiness used by him relates a lot to security and safety. "Singapore shows that feeling secure is more important than freedom when it comes to happiness", Buettner said.

However of interest to me is his interview with the MM. Apparently on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is maximum, MM scored 5 for happiness when he was a PM and 6 at the time of the interview 2 years ago. He told Buettner that he didn’t want to reach nine out of 10 because “Then I would be complacent, flabby and walk into the sunset.”I am still wondering what he really means.

If he hadn't given specific reasons for not wanting a much higher score of happiness I would have thought that he is being philosophical about it. Perhaps he thinks that there is no such thing as an almost perfect score for happiness. He may think it is human nature to be always craving for the feeling of well being, irrespective of whether a person attribues happiness to having either loving relationships, status, power, wealth, a sense of achievement or being altruistic. However, as every person goes through the highs and lows of life it is inevitable that these cravings can be lost temporarily or permanently. Hence perfect happiness is almost impossible as long as we crave for these deemed attributes of happiness or feel their inadequacy or loss.

However his words, “Then I would be complacent, flabby and walk into the sunset” seem to paint a picture of his refusal to be complacent because once he feels complacent he will be "flabby" and going downhill. Hmmm....so puzzling... Does that mean he is actually happy about being unhappy where unhappiness equals continuous strive?

Actually in counselling, we called this scaling. So you ask a client to rate his perhaps anger or sadness etc. Say if the client rates 6 out of 10 for sadness, you ask him what needs to happen for him to bring it down to 4. Alternatively to pep him up and to get him to focus on any good things happening to him, you may ask why he doesn't rate it 8 ie. getting him to think of the things that aren't so bad after all.

Actually this technique is part of the Solution Focused Therapy. Another technique is to ask the client the miracle question which goes like if a fairy godmother grants the client a miracle quietly at night such that what he wants is granted, when he wakes up the next morning what would have changed such that he suspects a miracle has happened. Maybe Buettner could have gotten a more comprehensive answer from MM if he had asked the miracle question. However, MM could have answered that he does not believe in miracles and we have to work for what we want.