Expect little and the world will surprise you |
There wasn't much of my grandfather to start with and by the time cancer finished devouring his slight frame there was very little left. But even though he's been in the ground for half a century, something about him has been nagging at me lately.
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Why, unlike so many in the world these days, was he always so damn happy?
By any modern measure Pop had few reasons to be cheerful. His father died young, leaving behind a brood of nine children in the midst of the Great Depression. Faced with few choices, his mother became expert at dodging rent collectors, moving her family from one cheap lodging to another every few months.
Dinner was often old bread doused in dripping with a little hope spread thinly on top. The kids huddled beneath blankets as threadbare as their clothes. Pop took a job in a glass factory long before he needed to shave and stayed there for the rest of his life. When he married, he and his wife moved into a small Housing Commission home with tissue-thin walls and an outdoor dunny and thought they were royalty.
Pop could so easily have grown into an old man wallowing in bitterness and victimhood. But instead of whingeing he whistled. Constantly. Small pleasures - an evening cup of Bonox, the football on the radio or a crossword waiting to be completed - were treated with the reverence of minor miracles.
So I've been wondering what he would have thought about the findings of the latest World Happiness Report, surely the most ironically titled publication on the planet. This annual compendium of misery and discontent has once again found rising unhappiness in affluent Western countries to the point where many experts believe it has become an epidemic.
That's right. At a time when never in history have so many had it so good - we live longer, travel further, eat better and are wealthier, healthier and arguably safer than any previous generation - we are feeling lonelier, more anxious and increasingly dissatisfied.
It's hard to argue with these findings. Happiness studies deserve our scepticism but repeated surveys across Europe, North American and Australia keep producing the same results, particularly among young people.
You could sense the general mood even before Donald Trump's latest excursion in the Middle East upended the global economy.
Everything felt...a little off.
Finger-pointing throws up the usual suspects. Consumerism makes us want endlessly. As soon as we acquire something we're conditioned to lust for whatever comes next - the house, the car, the holiday, the TV with a screen larger than a 1970s Drive-In.
Life, we've learned to accept, is one long perpetual upgrade.
There's also the modern phenomenon of........