It feels strange to write about happiness at a time like this. But if there’s one thing that’s certain about the world we’ve built, it is this: no matter how deep the despair right now, we will continue to believe that, ultimately, we deserve happiness as a right. 

So entrenched is this belief that despite the impossibly fragile (and subjective) nature of happiness, we now have an released today, that judges countries by how happy their people are.

We weren’t always this obsessed with happiness. Up until the 18th century, suffering and hardship were taken as the norm. You might even have said we deserved no better. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that humans were innately selfish and incapable of caring about the greater good. His antidote: imposing a “social contract” on humans. Hobbes believed that in the absence of society, life would be

But things changed. From being the hard-earned outcome of a virtuous life, happiness became something anyone could shop for.

On Tuesday night, as I said a silent thanks to Hobbes. What would our comfortable homes (which we are beginning to appreciate anew these past couple of weeks) be worth if we didn’t have this sense of society – mean, oppressive society but also magical, loveable society?

On the importance of laughter Laughter can help us feel happier. In this Ted Talk on the inner workings of laughter, Sophie Scott, a professor of cognitive neuroscience and a stand-up comedian, explains that laughing is not something that only humans do. Other mammals laugh too, mostly if they are playing or are in company. The same happens to us humans: we laugh when we are together with others, and it helps us regulate negative emotions and feel better. Studies have shown, for example, that couples who are stressed out can feel emotionally and physically better if they laugh together. It’s a useful lesson to keep in mind in these times of confinement. (Irene, First 1,000 Days correspondent) Ted: ‘Why we laugh’ (viewing time: 16 minutes)
Joy is not individual – it’s collective By now, most people understand that the desire to be happy most often ends up making us miserable. When "being happy" is our main goal, we risk discounting the validity of negative emotions (or end up feeling like failures when we’re not happy all the time). And striving for happiness is mostly an individual exercise these days – which is ironic, since true happiness is less likely to be found in the things we buy or the fitness routines we impose on ourselves than in our connection with others. It would be much better, writes academic and activist Lynne Segal in her book Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, to strive towards joy. The experience of joy almost always transcends the individual. It happens in the company of others, or when we feel connected to something bigger, like nature or time. Happiness is often presented as a potentially permanent state, while joy is only ever brief, fleeting. Segal’s plea reminded me of one of my favourite essays of all time: ‘Joy’ by Zadie Smith. Like Segal, Smith describes joy as something collective, something you are a part of. As Smith puts it, joy is so much richer and more complicated than sheer happiness, something she illustrates this with one of the truest descriptions of parenthood I’ve ever seen. Sometimes, her child brings her pleasure, but "mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognise as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily." (Lynn, Culture and Clichés correspondent) The New York Review of Books: ‘Joy’ (reading time: 12 minutes)

The best of The Correspondent on happiness

Close up portrait of a woman with dark hair with her eyes closed, a blue, green, red and purple glow covers the image. How we turned into batteries (and the economy forces us to recharge) Energy has become modern society’s holy grail, but what if we don’t want to spend our limited time on Earth constantly recharging and draining ourselves? In an age of punishing pressure to be productive, saying no is the opposite of negative. Read Lynn Berger’s article here Photo of folded paper planes on a carpeted floor The modern workplace is toxic. We need to overhaul how we think about mental health at work Stress and excessively long working hours contribute to the deaths of approximately 2.8 million workers every year. We urgently need to rethink mental health in the workplace. Here are four ways to start. Read Tanmoy Goswami’s article here Illustration of a woman sitting at a desk in a boat in a pond, staring at the screen of her laptop. First, eat the live frog (and two other good habits to start your day) Have years gone by while you put off writing that novel? Or would you like, for once, to begin a paper on time? Maybe you’d rather paint? Or make a documentary? Or finally get around to starting your own business? Read Ernst-Jan Pfauth’s article here