I have no idea why, or even how, he killed himself. The terse account on the Internet of his demise had to be run through Babel Fish because I don’t read the language. What was originally written was short and circumspect, and the machine translation is even less revealing.

It is probably safe to say that my ex-seminar-producing partner felt deeply unhappy and concluded that the paralyzing stalemate that his living had become wasn’t going to yield. So, tragically, he ended his life.

There are signs everywhere that a lot of people are unhappy. And there plenty of people around who are asking why and suggesting steps for them to take and, increasingly, for their governments to take, to make happiness more accessible and widespread. Some are claiming that in places like the U.S., the United Kingdom and Germany, happiness has been stagnating for years.

An “enlightened” idea that bombed—for a while
As is often the case on matters of the public good, Europeans seem to be ahead of Americans and much of the rest of the world in their levels of official wonderment about how to help people be happier.

In Britain, for example, there is Sir Richard Layard, the economist sometimes known as the “happiness czar.” Layard never misses a chance to campaign vigorously for his Principle of the Greatest Happiness.

He explains, “This says that I should aim to produce the most happiness I can in the world and, above all, the least misery.”

The idea sounds irrefutable and self-evidently right. And actually, it has been around for almost three centuries. Jurist Jeremy Bentham promoted it about the time America was born. As with Layard, Bentham advocated actions that increase everyone’s pleasure and decrease everyone’s pain. The concept caught on widely—and was called the most noble discovery of the Enlightenment.

But then, in one of history’s extraordinary ironies, no less than Bentham’s own godson, whom he raised, reversed all that, at least for a time. John Stuart Mill tried living his young life by such a precept, and it nearly killed him. Mill was contemplating suicide when he discovered the Romantics—the Coleridges and Wordsworths—and came to this conclusion, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

Gross national product is out, bonheur is in
Mill concluded that happiness is like a crab—it approaches you sideways. He thought deliberately pursuing happiness was a deal-killer, a fool’s errand.

To measure happiness, you must first decide what happiness is, Mill concluded. He thought happiness is impossible to pin down. He put in a good word for pain, too. For example, falling in love often brings pain, but it is a part of any rich life. So Bentham’s single-minded “principle of utility” faded in economics and politics, buried by Mill’s “let happiness find you” arguments.

That was then, though. And this is now. There has come to be what is sometimes called “the science of happiness.” Even governments are starting to move into the picture or make noises like they’d like to.

In France last week, President Nicholas Sarcozy’s top-drawer commission to study what governments should be doing to make people happier released its report. Essentially, it called on governments to “help people produce the most happiness you can in the world and, above all, the least misery.” From now on, Sarcozy says that economic progress in France will be measured not by GNP (gross national product) but by “bonheur” (happiness). “The [banking] crisis doesn’t only make us free to imagine other models, another future, another world. It obliges us to do so,” he said, happily.

So we’ve come full circle. And if you are trying to decide how to be happy, a very full circle it is. It can be a very confusing one, too. Because neoBenthamism has become very John-Stuart-Mill-like in its variety. That is, it has a kind of anything goes, laissez faire spirit about it.

Prescribed routes to happiness that take many paths
There is happiness psychologist Dr. Robert Holden, who says he can make happy optimists of clinical depressives simply by getting them to laugh or simulate laugher for 20 minutes a day and think positive thoughts all day long. Hypnotist Paul McKenna’s “Endorphin Button” exercise is quicker. You recall happy times, enhance the colors in your memory and squeeze your thumb and index finger together five times.

Neuroscientist Dr. Nick Lavidis had an epiphany while strolling through Yosemite National Park. The smell of freshly cut grass produced pleasant feelings. So Lavidis now markets a room spray that—you guessed it!—releases a chemical like that in grass cuttings. Lavidis says it stimulates the hippocampus, improving our memory functions and good feelings.

Sociologist Nicholas Christakis and political scientist James Fowler believe social relationships can cause happiness to be passed from person to person like they were contagious viruses. They got the idea by studying the famed Framingham Heart Study, which started following 15,000 people back in 1948. Your happiness can not only affect your friends but also friends of your friends. And get this: it may affect your friends’ friends, even if it didn’t affect your friends! (Unhappily, bad habits are also transmitted this way, too. Like obesity, smoking or using harmful drugs.)

In his book on college students and achievement, Derek Bok, the former Harvard University president, flagged three consequences of poor health as producing long-lasting unhappiness: mental illness (notably depression), chronic pain and sleep deprivation (notably insomnia). He said these “afflict a surprising number of people and have a marked and continuing effect on well-being.’’

Speaking of Harvard University, a study there has been tracking hundreds of students for more than 70 years. Researchers have concluded that seven major factors are most likely to produce happy old-timers: mature adaptations (or the ability to respond well to problems), education, a stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, exercise and maintaining a healthy weight.

The “I’m OK, You’re OK” view of happiness
Numerous studies have suggested that childless couples experience more enjoyable times and fewer stressful ones than couples with children. The enjoyable-times penalty from having children is even greater for women. But if producing successful, happy, productive children makes you happy, having a family is a happiness no-brainer.

And that’s the anti-Benthamic rub to bringing any real coherence to the happiness movement: one person’s happiness maker may be another person’s pleasure eraser.

All of which causes experts like Dr. Caroline West to adjudge the Bentham-versus-Mill controversy a wash. West teaches a popular course called “The Philosophy of Happiness” at the University of Sydney. She says:

“We’re inclined to think that there is something that happiness really is. If we only knew which of enjoyment and aspiration-fulfillment happiness really was, then we would know what to be basing these and other important life decisions on. The problem is that there isn’t an answer to the question of what happiness really is. And there’s certainly no answer that everyone will agree with.

“What one person means by ‘happiness’ can be completely different to what the next person means, far more different than we commonly imagine…. Happiness can be used to refer a momentary sensation, such as pleasure or enjoyment. Or it might refer to an enduring mood, such as tranquility or contentment. Or believing that one’s desires are being achieved, or the actual achievement of one’s desires. Or believing one’s life as a whole is going well, in terms of one’s own priorities. Or leading a life that is considered to be—from some objective standpoint—worthwhile.”

I would wish that my former seminar partner and I could have talked about some of this. In his right mind, he would have enjoyed the discussion. On the trains of Europe in those yesteryear travels, we talked about a lot of things. I particularly remember one animated discussion on a long trip between Mannheim and the Polish border about John Galt’s radio speech in Atlas Shrugged. There was much, we both agreed, in the speech that spoke to our own sensibilities and ideals.

What I would liked to have shared with my friend
If he had asked on those trips about my personal thoughts on being happy, I’d probably have said things like this:

Remember that happiness ebbs and flows. People have a range of happiness and move up and down in it. Of course, some are simply congenitally and seemingly forever joyous. And then the happiness capacity of others appears to vacillate somewhere between a passing break in the clouds and a murderous funk. The rest of us are somewhere in between and usually make do.

Brain chemistry is important but it isn’t everything. If you need antidepressants to ward off danger to yourself, hurry on to your physician. But remember that time can be a potent healer, too. And that learning is not a pain-free zone. An irreducible side effect of the good-feelings-from-the-medicine-cabinet drugs is that they close certain self-correcting and insight-filled windows on the mind and soul.

Few actions in life encourage expanded happiness and satisfaction more than “willing” oneself to initiate positive self-change. It’s both an art and a science. A key element is often pro-actively seeking out increased connectivity of the right kind—finding people you can be close to or at least be around who don’t mind you being happier.

Find your own happiness rhythms and honor them. Give into the highs and enjoy them to the fullest. Accept the lows and understand that they are almost certain to pass. Then view and treat the in-betweens as the times when you are cleaning up the messes left over from previous train wrecks or wrong track choices and preparing for the arrival of the next great moments.

Understand that if you find happiness, it’s going to have to be on your terms. Happiness is not a pure quality. It is a concoction of tradeoffs negotiated between the self that you ideally wish to be and the self that bumps its nose against a surprise-prone, often uncooperative world every day. You need to find your own personal recipe for responding to this mix, or it will never work or taste right.

The current moment can be a real shrew. It lies a lot. It may profess to own you soul and marrow and insist it will never let go. When it says that, look it in the eye and spit in its face. And remind yourself that in a few hours, or a few days, or a few months, you will most likely be restored and healed but the current moment will be nothing but a smear on a neuron, if that.

Get really, really good at the inner art of cleaning the slate. I’m not into meditating but I’m told by those who are that this can be very effective mental squeegee. What I often do is switch gears. Spring the unexpected on my mind. Read the unpredictable book. Watch another culture’s films. Visit a restaurant in a part of town that our neighbors or usual crowd wouldn’t think of being seen in. Or sometimes, just book a trio of big Ryder or Penske rental trucks and move half-way across the U.S. And watch from the corner of my eyes for the happiness crab to again sidle into view.

What my erstwhile European colleague and friend—may he gently rest in peace—would have thought of John Stuart Mill’s advice in those final moments, I have no idea. When you can see no light at the tunnel’s end, it probably doesn’t help to be told to forget happiness and just get on with living the best way you know how. But it’s probably good advice at most other times. Happiness may show up anyway. And even if it doesn’t, you’ll be a lot less unhappy at not having found all the happiness you think you deserve.

Actually, sometimes I watch his entire show. As when Bill Maher, the philosopher comedian, sheds more truth in an hour (minus commercials) than a year’s worth of Meet the Press. No such luck tonight. Tonight, I get “Chicken Soup for the Soul” genius Jack Canfield. Joe Vitale, the hypno-marketing/minister/therapist. And three other think-yourself-happy-happy-happy gurus.

King prattled his way through this opening: “Tonight, want to find true love, make more money, have the life of your dreams? Then think about it. That’s right. The power of your thoughts can improve your life. Sound unthinkable? Well, science says there’s something to it, so engage your brain for an amazing hour that could transform your world and help you live happily ever after.”

And the first question goes to an everything-is-energy-and-vibration authority named James Ray, famed for his “Law of Attraction.”

Which is what?

Answers Ray: “The law of attraction says when you’re in a certain vibration you’re going to attract to you that which you’re in vibration or harmonic vibration with”—and they’re off, en masse, host and hosted, to live happily ever after, or at least for the next hour, pontificating about how to think yourself into a frenzy of continual bliss.

I’m being overly cynical. Believe it or not, we brain-function-studies types watch the
think-yourself-happy-happy-happy gurus as closely as most. Because they have outsized followings at the moment in the most advanced of our societies, including the U.S., the U.K., and Europe in particular. In those parts of society where there is surplus wealth, the happiness-is-a-state-of mind cult can flourish. It’s not that most of the followers of the Jack Canfields and Joe Vitales and James Rays necessarily have a lot of surplus wealth. It’s just that they are, at least momentarily, freed of just enough of the grimmer realities of life enough of the time to think that they can have a surplus of wealth, happiness and all else if only they get their vibrations right.

I wish them well … and wellness. But I can’t help but wonder what they would have had to say to people in neighborhoods where my family and I have lived on occasion of the onset of totally unexpected vibrations like these: (1) At 4 in the morning, a 21-year-old inebriated youth fails to make the slight curve at the end of our street, steers his car straight into a tree and dies instantly three doors down from our house. For days, his young friends stop, park, approach the tree, kneel, leave flowers, shout out feelings of hurt, lean on supportive shoulders or pull away angrily and flee. (2) Our next door neighbor was 48. He died a few weeks ago of a heart attack while coaching his son’s soccer game. Our banker said the mother of five was sobbing so hard when she opened the bank account for gifts to the children’s college fund in his memory it saddened the whole bank staff. (3) The son was 29, a life-long sufferer from schizophrenia—and off his meds. He shot his father to death upstairs while his mother fled to hide in a downstairs closet, cell phone in hand. Our teenaged daughter was home alone next door. It happened during a shift change at the police station. It took the cops forever to arrive. Who knows what else might have happened?

And these are some of the safest neighborhoods, statistically, in America. And this is what the happiness-is-a-state-of mind cults almost always ignore.

So I won’t.

The chances are pretty remote that you’ll ever be watching Dudley Lynch Live on CNN, but if it happens, here’s my opening night’s line-up of guests:

Dr. Thomas Attig, author of How We Grieve: Relearning the World and The Heart of Grief: Death and the Search for Lasting Love. Attig is an expert on brain vibrations, too. The vibrations of bereavement. In How We Grieve, an especially fine work, he warns about how our brains must struggle during extreme grief with a long list of vibrating vulnerabilities. And of all that the brain must relearn: the world, ourselves, our relationships with the deceased, as starters. Powerful stuff, experienced every moment by someone somewhere, maybe even next door.

Dr. Stephen Law, author of The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking. As regular readers of this blog know, I tend to be critical, dismissive even, of a huge amount of what philosophers think, write and say. But not of this philosopher’s work. He wants us all to be better thinkers and use some of the tools of philosophy to assure that we don’t live unexamined lives. In The Gym, he teaches us how to “question the assumptions and unpick the arguments” of people who would rather we be sheep than shepherd (and who often appear on Larry King Live).

And, of course, representatives from the families of the people who have died suddenly in recent years almost within an arm’s reach of my front door. How have their brains coped when so much of what they were in “harmonic vibration” with suddenly disappeared or unraveled?

I may even invite Larry King. I’d like to ask him what he really thinks of the think-yourself-happy-happy-happy gurus he keeps inviting on his show.

You can read the transcript of the Larry King Live program here:  “The Power of Positive Thinking”

Order Tom Attig’s books here:
The Heart of Grief: Death and the Search for Lasting Love
How We Grieve: Relearning the World

There’s an interview with Attig here: “Interview with Tom”

Order Stephan Law’s book here: The Philosophy Gym: 25 Short Adventures in Thinking

Go here for Law’s web site: “Thinking Big”

You can see if your anti-Puppy Dog filter works any better than mine by reading these paragraphs for yourself:

O, that a man might know The end of this day’s business ere it come!—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar. Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm, and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet, and split infinitives. Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: “The human being is the only animal that . . .” We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, of course, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence. We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with “can use language” were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with “uses tools.” So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

I have never before written The Sentence, but I’d like to do so now, with you as my witness. The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. Now, let me say up front that I’ve had cats, I’ve had dogs, I’ve had gerbils, mice, goldfish, and crabs (no, not that kind), and I do recognize that nonhuman animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference. For example, I live in an urban neighborhood, and every autumn the squirrels in my yard (which is approximately the size of two squirrels) act as though they know that they will be unable to eat later unless they bury some food now. My city has a relatively well-educated citizenry, but as far as anyone can tell its squirrels are not particularly distinguished. Rather, they have regular squirrel brains that run food-burying programs when the amount of sunlight that enters their regular squirrel eyes decreases by a critical amount. Shortened days trigger burying behavior with no intervening contemplation of tomorrow, and the squirrel that stashes a nut in my yard “knows” about the future in approximately the same way that a falling rock “knows” about the law of gravity—which is to say, not really. Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or smiles as it contemplates its summer vacation, or turns down a taffy apple because it already looks too fat in shorts, I will stand by my version of The Sentence. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity.

You can read a few more paragraphs of Dr. Gilbert’s work for free (in fact, you’ll have to read them to find out what he thinks the human brain’s greatest achievement is) and find order information here: Stumbling on Happiness