Happiness Hacking

I'm reading a very interesting, if somewhat 'pop', book at the moment called "Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World" by Jane McGonigal, a successful game designer. Her fundamental question is "If so many people are palying games, when they all have real jobs and real lives, then the question should be 'what are they finding in the game and how can we make reality as interesting'", except that of course she takes more pages and does a much better job of selling it. (If nothing else, have a look at this book. It's interesting.)

It's easy to push out the lazy explanations of 'escapism' or 'conditioning for over-stimulation', yet that fails to explain people working for hours to carry out a repetitive and relatively uninteresting task, all for the joy of levelling up. Until such time as you realise that the number of opportunities that we level up in real life are surprisingly small.

Sure you can work at your boring job for week after week and, if you're really lucky, you'll edge out the inanimate carbon rod employee of the month. No-one is saying 'quit your job'. But if you want a real sense of achievement and you're one the lucky few who has a job where they control their lives, and make real and measurable change, and basically either level up regularly or they can change the game so that they do... well, where else are you going to go but somewhere else for that feeling of achievement?

Now I don't want to dwell too much on that, it's scene setting and the book is far better at talking about this than I am. I want to talk about happiness hacking - things that you do to make your world better in a way that increases happiness. Now, a naive (or disingenuous) few of this is that maximising your own happiness requires you to steal it from other people, or to act in a completely selfish way.

To which, I say, screw you. Now, you see, this has already made me happy and, probably, it's made a number of my life-minded readers smirk as well. So what I've just done is put something there that will make my community smirk, and it's even kind of funny for the selfish people out there. Let's face it, if you're really right wing or ultra-selfish, you're probably not my friend and you wouldn't like me much anyway. It's ok. I probably wouldn't like you much either.

But I don't want to lose the point too much. Let's just say that by making my community happier, I'm just raised the overall tone a bit. Everyone's a bit looser. Not as loose as a long-necked goose, but probably as loose as a short mallard after a stiff martini.

Did you smirk again? Maybe, maybe not. They can't all be gems.

I am a serial offender when it comes to happiness hacker. I have a fairly good smile and I don't look like an axe murderer. I'm also old enough and average-enough looking that when I smile at people in a friendly manner, the most likely response is a smile back, as opposed to the sign of the cross, dialling for the police or a phone number. Whenever someone does something nice, I make the time to thank them and smile at them. This is fundamentally happiness hacking, a la me, practiced before I even knew it was a concept. Now, I wasn't doing this to be polite, I was always actively doing this to make the other person feel better, to acknowledge them and that what they had done was a nice thing and I was happy about. The net result of most this was more smiles.

Now, in contrast, while I can get snappy and grumpy when bad things happen, it is rare that I actually act on these impulses because it is very hard to convey complex concepts of dissatisfaction at high speed. If I toot someone repeatedly from my car because they have displease me, what am I saying? Am I saying "go faster", "go slower", " get out of my way", "are you a God", "my igloo is on fire" or "screw you"? Most of the time, if I get tooted, I'm pretty sure I know what it's saying. And, given that it's rarely justified, that "screw you feeling" hangs around for a long time - and it can be hard to earth and get rid of. So, because I know what it feels like, rather than go down the negative path, I choose to go for positive reinforcement.

Show me how someone deals with a slow driver in front of them, a trainee check-out attendant or a slightly inexperienced member of the waiting staff and I'll have a fairly good idea of what kind of person they are. All of my friends are nice people. Some, truth be told, are nicer than others, some look out more than they look in, others do the reverse, all are my friends, warts and all. (All of them are probably sitting there saying "Well, I know what group I'm in but the rest of those buggers... Well!")

I am most definitely not putting myself up as perfect. I'm not proud of my flaws but I acknowledge them and I think about them and I try, every day, to work around them. And I deal with them more easily when I'm happy. And I'm happier when I put myself into places and situations that allow me to be generous, and nice, and that requires me to hack my surroundings and making it the kind of place where people smile at each other, and they don't leap on the horn for 30 seconds to say... whatever the hell it is they're trying to say.

There are so many other ways to try and bring up the happiness levels. Bringing resources to people who don't have them, like the Fitzroy Learning Network that a friend of mine works with, is not just about education - it's about short-circuiting poverty traps and ripping the rug out from underneath hatred and violence. I'm not saying that you have to dance around in hemp pants waving flowers but, if it makes you happy and everyone around looks cynical but they take a flower and put it up and that flower makes them happy for the next few hours, every time they look at it, then maybe it's worth a try.

I've given up being cool. (He says that, but you know that's posing...) It's hard to maintain much cool when you run a lot, especially cross-country. Pretending to be cool, which I never was, never made me happy, but running often does. Would you like to know the race medal that makes me happiest? It's the one I got when a friend and I worked together to finish a hellish race where one of us was cramping badly and other was injured. We couldn't have got across the line without each other. Every time I look at that medal I smile and I'm as proud as hell of it. I don't care what time I run, but, apparently, I'm not the kind of person to leave someone halfway up a mountain when they're in trouble, even if they're not actually in danger. That, to me, is the essence of happiness hacking, you do something that doesn't just make you happy, you do something that makes your whole environment better and you then get this amazing guilt-free non-indulgent pleasure of just being happy.

Helping someone else to do something is great hacking. The only difficulty is in finding a sufficiently fast runner to injure slightly so that you can then hit the correct pace for your goal time! (Kidding...)

One of the most important steps I've taken in happiness hacking is to try and maintain a personal level that allows me to share myself with the world, rather than closing down and looking inwards, because this way my madness lies. To do that, I now restrict some of the things that I read and watch. I was reading some eBooks that I downloaded by Charlie Huston. Reasonably well-written crime but horrible. Really, really horrible. I looked at it and thought "Urm, seems a little familiar and I don't need to read about animal torture or vomit." and deleted the book.

Now, having said that, I still watch Event Horizon, or Doomsday. Why? Because they don't make me feel bad. They're silly and scenery chewing and nobody is getting hurt. But why am I making myself feel bad in order to 'enjoy' a book? It doesn't make any sense unless the content, or the text, is so valuable that I decide to go on. So I still read real-world horror stories, and I still read and watch good unpleasant films, but my days of watching and reading nasty are probably over.

I realised this when I was watching Quantum of Solace again and there's a scene that makes me sad. It is supposed to be a bit sad, but there is so little to raise this film up that it just nails the whole tone. And it's not really that much of a film. And Bond is, ultimately, a horrible thug of a creature - a villain who is working for the correct side. A weapon that should never be used. So why am I watching this crap if it makes me sad? I know that life is brutish, short and, ultimately, deadly. I could be watching something silly, or fun, or exciting.

Or something where the heroes stand up and strive, and try to make the world a better place, and even if they don't win every time, they never completely lose. That, incidentally, is why I like Dr Who again. Ten was too Bondian for my liking. Too willing to risk everyone else's life on his ego, too willing to use people as pawns and, to be honest, too willing to shag the totty if they were sufficiently young, blonde and white. Eleven makes me happy.

I don't, as always, have much of a point. Maybe some of this was interesting, maybe there are some seeds of ideas here, maybe something made you happy. I feel better for having written it. I hope you feel better for having read it, because then I'll feel even better again!