What really makes us happy

published 24 April 2015

We had another of those tiresome surveys last week, asking people to rank the things that make them feel happiest. The answers were not inspiring: finding money unexpectedly... feeling the sun on your face... sleeping in a freshly made bed (that's the one that came top).

"Oh please," said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. "Yes, it is a pleasant sensation to climb into newly washed bed linen, especially if the dog has been sick on the covers, but that makes us happier than anything else? I don't think so."

What does make us happy is others' misfortune: Schadenfreude, a pleasure that is both free and gratifying. Liddle says he felt chipper all last weekbecause a friend of his had been (mistakenly) outed as the husband of Barry Manilow: "nothing really beats the intense personal discomfort and embarrassment of a very close friend".

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But whatever the misfortune reading about a lottery winner, say, who has lost everything through stupidity, "particularly his money. But also his new wife. And his new house" it beats clean sheets any day.

The Daily Mail's Tom Utley felt similarly Schadenfreudeish when he read the annual survey by What Car? magazine ranking motor manufacturers according to the reliability of their products.He enjoyed being told that Bentleys and Porsches are not as reliable as less posh cars such as Hondas and Toyotas, or his own "trusty" Ford Focus.

Even if you have doubts about the way the survey was done, the gist of its findings is almost certainly true: "people who swank around in flash motors tend to have an awful lot more trouble with their cars" than the rest of us. So What Car? gave me "a frisson of malicious pleasure", says Utley.

It wasn't because he covets an expensive car himself that he was smiling, or because eight of the ten most unreliable models in the table are built by German-owned companies. It was simply because there is something nasty in "human nature" that makes us think "malicious thoughts" about many of our fellow human beings, simply because they're richer than us. That seems to me true enough, though I doubt you'll get many people taking part in happiness surveys who'll admit it.

Pity the neighbours

This didn't go down well because, as India Knight says in The Sunday Times, this is a London borough "where people still wear Alice bands without irony". But one can't but feel sorry for the neighbours. They fear what plenty of central Londoners have already endured: months, if not years, of disruption while some monstrous subterranean basement is constructed. No wonder so many people are moving to the country.

Tabloid money: don't put Che Guevara in Downing Street

"He builds expensive one-offs and, as his latest project won't be finished for another five months, he fears a mixture of the mansion tax and Che Guevara in Downing Street will make the joint unsellable. I agree with him Miliband has nothing to offer these one-man businesses Except a return to poverty."

Nicola Sturgeon has "lost shed-loads of weight," says Carole Malone in the Sunday Mirror. "She's got a sleeker, less carroty new hairdo. She's got a natty new wardrobe of suits with matching stilettos and confidence way beyond her abilities... If Ed's prepared to do better, I'll help him,' she said patronisingly. Yep, she'll help him all right into an early political grave. And the rest of us back into recession."

"While Socialist Ed enjoys his Upstairs, Downstairs kitchen arrangements, with the familys nanny confined to the downstairs," says The Mail on Sunday's Black Dog, there is "no such luxury for north London neighbour Boris Johnson. He boasts: Just the one kitchen for us, and we share it with our nanny everyone mucks in here'."

"The Queen is fond of Andrew Neil's interrogation of politicians on BBC 2's Daily Politics", reports Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail. He quotes his royal source: "HM can't be directly briefed by the parties themselves during the election campaign, but she tries, whenever possible, to settle downeach weekday at noon to watch [Neil] grill the politicians. She is said to compare him favourably with her own grilling of prime ministers at weekly audiences. Her pre-lunch gin and Dubonett (a gin-and-it, as it's called) is served half-way through the programme."