We spend so much time trying to figure out all our complicated gadgets that we've forgotten what it means to be happy, writes Robyn Swann.
Has it occurred to anyone else how much time we now spend reading instructions on, setting up, repairing, or otherwise fiddling with all the things meant to assist, amuse, entertain or inform us? More time, perhaps, than we spend being assisted, amused, entertained or informed.
Take last Thursday, when I headed off to buy a pair of shoes. I wanted something sturdy for walking, so popped into a shop with windows piled high with MBTs. (For those of you who are insufficiently tuned, MBT stands for Masai Barefoot Technology - the African warrior-inspired footwear that seems to be on everyone's feet.) I picked up the least unattractive model. Then I slipped it on. Fabulous. A record for me - less than three minutes from door to cashier.
That's when things started to slow down. Though I had already had the shoes both on and off and was standing in front of the saleswoman, credit card in hand, she insisted on sitting me down for a lecture on "the proper fit of an MBT". That was followed by a lesson in how to stand and walk. She insisted, too, on thrusting into my hands both a guidebook and an instructional DVD. This for shoes.
Next it was the car. We've only had it a short while and I haven't yet found the time to master how to tune the stereo. When I push the "on" switch, the display panel flashes a perky "Hello", and scrolls a series of possible musical choices: "Hip Hop", "Jazz", "Rock", or "Classical".
With growing frustration, I fumble at the unlabelled buttons, trying to find my station of choice. I eventually poke at them in despair until I find the on/off switch. Then - the impertinence of it! - it winks, "Bye-Bye. See you!"
Then there's the mobile, with a four-page, 200-step instruction sheet for setting up e-mail, web browsing and other personal functions.
It didn't help. Only hours of calls to Nokia and Vodafone later did I discover why I couldn't get the damn thing to work. There should have been 201 steps - the 201st being the one you just can't do without.
On it goes. The user's manual for the "portable, stand-alone" DVD player gives no instructions on how to turn it on. Nor on how to start the DVD rolling. Instead, it offers complex diagrams showing how to connect the player to a wall socket, television, amplifier or missile launcher. Portable? Stand-alone? Have I missed something?
Then there's bloody Barney. A stuffed dinosaur doll that comes with an ISP cable and web address so your child can personalise his chatter with the purple idol. Sadly, the web designer never conjured with the name we've given to our son, so Barney just repeats "Hello, frrriienddd" again and again in that irritating falsetto of his. "Castrato", rather - and I wish I'd done the job myself.
iTunes, meanwhile, won't accept my very ordinary, very valid credit card.
When I try to e-mail the so-called help desk it just offers me versions of The Beatles' Help!. None sung by The Beatles. Just a moment ago, the husband shouted from the next room, wanting to know how to turn on the overhead fan. He's already yanked the cord, flipped the wall switch, and is now thumping away on the remote.
Wouldn't it be easier on the blood pressure, I suggest, just to open a window and let a cool breeze in? I know what you're thinking: Luddites queue to the left. But I'm no technophobe. My problem is the proliferation of complicated stuff they want us to think we need these days.
The great economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied our current dilemma 80 years ago. In his essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, he foresaw a time - just around now - when mankind would have overcome its fundamental economic problem, the struggle for subsistence. "For the first time since his creation," Keynes wrote, "man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure that science and compound interest have won for him . . . ". We in the wealthy West are the grandchildren of whom Keynes wrote. He saw that the needs of human beings tend to fall into two categories. Some needs are "absolute", real - we feel them regardless of the state of others (the need for food, for example). Others are, to use Keynesian words, "relative". We feel them only in the sense that satisfying them makes us feel superior to others.
Our relative needs, though, increase as our absolute needs are met. Relative needs are as insatiable as the mind and the market's ability to dream them up. (Only when our bellies are full do we begin to crave a PlayStation 3.) I'd only quibble a little with the venerable Keynes. I'd relabel his "absolute needs" and "relative needs" as "needs" and "wants". I'd also add that somewhere along the road between Needs and Wants we've taken a wrong turn. We're now driving ourselves to Distraction. To make ourselves happy, we've decided, we need more stuff. Ever more complicated stuff.
My own happiest moments, though - the most fulfilled, the most free of want - have been spent in wellies, or armpit deep in flour, or slumped around a table with good friends and a bottle of wine. My most definitive moment of happiness as an adult came as I rolled on the floor playing with my 18-month-old first-born. That unplanned moment of joyous contentment is the benchmark for me. Not an MP3 player, mobile phone, video game, or therapeutic shoe in sight.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert won this year's Royal Society Prize for Science Books for his bestseller Stumbling on Happiness. In it he questions the notion that any of us know what happiness is, let alone how to achieve it. In Gilbert's view, human beings lack the imagination to accurately predict the things that will make them happy. If we do wake up one morning in a state of happiness, he says, it's not by dint of any consciously pursued plan, activity or product - we simply stumble upon it.
Gilbert could be right. If we weren't so busy pursuing happiness, it might more often sneak up on us from behind. Perhaps it's time to lift our eyes up from all those instructions and see what happens.