Happiness interests me. So I read everything I find serious on the issue. This is the case of What is a happy life? (L’Homme, 2023, 492 pages), a solid study by psychiatrist Robert Waldinger and psychologist Marc Schulz, both from Harvard University.
The book, like many others in its genre, is too long, it nevertheless arrives at two general truths which deserve to be repeated. More than anything else, it is quality human relationships that make us happy, and it is never too late to get started, regardless of our social conditions. That’s what I tell myself, in fact.
When it comes to happiness, however, I have even better sources. Pierre Foglia, first. In a striking column published in The Press On December 8, 1994, the journalist responded to distraught parents who wondered why privileged young people sometimes end up committing suicide.
The columnist’s response: “Because they are not happy, madam. »The reason for this distress, he added, is “that we have failed to teach them happiness”. We loved them very much, but we did not teach them the joy of loving.
We also did not know how to convey to them the joy of learning. We send them to school telling them that it is important to become this or that and, in doing so, we miss the point. “Learn for nothing, to become Someone. “Elevating yourself a little to be able to talk to your dog” is what counts, says Foglia.
Choosing a profession based on the prestige and salary attached to it is the ultimate way to waste your life. Happiness isn’t about being rich or famous, it’s about “doing something you love to do.” Basically, writes the happy man that is Foglia, happiness comes down to “three things”, in this order: “work, curiosity, fiancée”.
My second source, Maupassant, confirms the last item on this short list. In his short story “ Happiness »published in 1885 in the collection Tales of the day and the nightMaupassant tells the story of an old woman met in deep Corsica by a passing traveler.
While chatting a little with her, the traveler is surprised to learn that the woman is a former “young girl, beautiful and rich”, originally from Lorraine, who had disappeared fifty years earlier and who was suspected of having been kidnapped by a soldier from the regiment commanded by her father. Since then, she was believed to be dead.
However, in this place of misery, the traveler meets a happy woman next to her soldier who has become deaf. The rich young girl, writes Maupassant, became a peasant out of love for this peasant, she abandoned luxury for rusticity in order to live with the one who “had filled her existence with happiness from one end to the other”.
During the night that he spends in the hovel, “listening to the hoarse breathing of the old soldier lying on his pallet”, the traveler, taken aback, thinks “of this strange and simple adventure, of this happiness so complete, made of so little “.
My first two sources say enough, it seems to me, that money, prestige and success have nothing to do with this affair. Albert Einstein thought the same thing. In 1922, during a speaking tour in Japan, a courier gave him a letter. As a thank you, the scientist gives the young man a note written on a sheet bearing the logo of the hotel where he is staying, found in 2017. What does it say? “A quiet and modest life brings more joy than the search for success, which involves constant agitation. »
Great minds, therefore, agree on this, but have difficulty convincing the public, always quick to respond “yes, but more money couldn’t do any harm”. Hence my fourth source. In News, in February 2004, the economist Pierre Fortin brilliantly refuted the idea that money brings happiness. His thesis is based on that of the philosophers of Antiquity, who affirmed that once one had achieved reasonable material comfort, happiness was found elsewhere, notably in “the life of the spirit, the practice of good and the harmony of social relations.
Fortin cites a global survey by Canadian economist John Helliwell of 88,000 people from 46 countries. His conclusion is the same as that of the philosophers: in poor countries, an increase in wealth contributes to happiness by relieving poverty; in rich countries, this effect disappears, and happiness is rather linked to good health, to a stable job and family life, to faith in God (yes!), to involvement in the community and about living in a free society.
It’s strong: even from an economic point of view, money does not buy happiness. Look elsewhere!
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.