Never mind eternal youth - adulthood is a subversive ideal

Empirical evidence confirms what honest introspection suggests: most people are happier after reaching middle age

• 
• • Susan Neiman
  • The Guardian, Sunday 5 October 2014 16.45 BST

‘There is reason to suspect those who tell the young to savour the best years of their lives.’ Photograph: Liv Friis-Larsen /Alamy

Where did we get the idea that youth is the best time of your life? Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealise the stages of youth. Growing up has come to be viewed as a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams, accepting the limits of the reality you’ve been given, and resigning yourself to a life that will be more boring and less significant than you supposed when you began it. Increasingly, grownups appear not merely sad but pathetic.

Consider the difference between JM Barrie’s Peter Pan and Steven Spielberg’s reworking for the movie Hook. Barrie’s grownups are dull but menacing, occasionally wistful; Spielberg’s grownups are ridiculous, not only ill-equipped for the adventures of Neverland but barely fit to live at all. Given the lack of compelling role models of adults in western media, it’s no wonder that Peter Pan is seen as a figure of rebellion, or that a great writer’s fondest wish for his newborn is that the child may stay for ever young.

Outside of fairy tales, no one remains a child for ever. For this reason the time of life most often idealised is the decade between 18 and 28, when young men’s muscles and young women’s skin are at their most blooming. Yet few people who are in or past that decade would choose to repeat it. For most of us, it’s a time of doubt and fear – that every decision is irrevocably fateful, that everyone else is more confident and capable, and above all that we aren’t sufficiently enjoying what we’re told is the best time of our lives.

Empirical evidence confirms what honest introspection knows: most people are happier after reaching middle age. Though there are variations in the global low point – the Swiss reach it at 35, while Ukrainians don’t hit rock bottom until 62 – all report becoming steadily happier after that. Researchers controlled all of the obvious factors, such as income, employment and family status, and found they didn’t matter: from the US to Zimbabwe, the evidence that life is not a downhill path is constant.

What explains the consensus on something so clearly false? An answer can be found where we might least expect it, in the work of Immanuel Kant. His famous essay What is Enlightenment? describes humankind’s exit from its self-imposed immaturity. Growing up isn’t bad, but isn’t easy. Laziness and fear lead us to acquiesce: it’s much easier to let others think for us.

Growing up, like enlightenment, is as much a matter of courage as of knowledge. Kant’s call to have the courage to use your own reason is well known, but few have heeded the warning that comes after it: no government has an interest in cultivating adults. It is far simpler to care for distracted consumers than to satisfy the demands of self-confident citizens.

So most of us spend our working lives making or marketing products developed to divert us. The things that capture our attention are never depicted as toys but as tools that are crucial for being adult. Bewildered by the choice when purchasing a smartphone, we easily forget how many decisions are out of our hands. Or did you choose to live in a world where oil companies can wreck the planet, governments spend more on weapons than on education, and children starve every minute for want of food others throw away?

Grownups take on questions that determine real lives, knowing they will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. Both are surely tempting, and successfully resisting them is key to growing up. Not permanent youth but genuine adulthood is a subversive ideal.

There is reason to suspect those who tell the young to savour the best years of their lives. The tone is cheery, but the message is ominous: everything else will get worse. Thus young people are prepared to expect – and to demand – very little.

No conspiracy theories are necessary: we often collude in our own infantilisation, as we often join in with the curious derision that greets the news that an ageing rock star has reached a round-numbered birthday or opened a concert or gone on tour. Isn’t it time these people accepted their obsolescence and left the stage to others?

This sort of disdain and mockery is all the more puzzling since the recent concerts of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen were anything but laughable. Among others, these artists have shown how far and for how long human and creative development can continue, surviving flops and falls and excess and error – thus providing some models of growing up for which we can be grateful.

David Steindl-Rast: Want to be happy? Be grateful

David Steindl-Rast: Want to be happy? Be grateful

The Bhagawad Gita for Students

Purposeful Living

Materialism: a system that eats us from the inside out

Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive 

• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013 20.30 GMT

Owning more doesn't bring happiness: 'the material pursuit of self-esteem reduces self-esteem.' Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

That they are crass, brash and trashy goes without saying. But there is something in the pictures posted on Rich Kids of Instagram (and highlighted by the Guardian last week) that inspires more than the usual revulsion towards crude displays of opulence. There is a shadow in these photos – photos of a young man wearing all four of his Rolex watches, a youth posing in front of his helicopter, endless pictures of cars, yachts, shoes, mansions, swimming pools and spoilt white boys throwing gangster poses in private jets – of something worse: something that, after you have seen a few dozen, becomes disorienting, even distressing.

The pictures are, of course, intended to incite envy. They reek instead of desperation. The young men and women seem lost in their designer clothes, dwarfed and dehumanised by their possessions, as if ownership has gone into reverse. A girl's head barely emerges from the haul of Chanel, Dior and Hermes shopping bags she has piled on her vast bed. It's captioned "shoppy shoppy" and "#goldrush", but a photograph whose purpose is to illustrate plenty seems instead to depict a void. She's alone with her bags and her image in the mirror, in a scene that seems saturated with despair.

Perhaps I'm projecting my prejudices. But an impressive body of psychological research seems to support these feelings. It suggests that materialism, a trait that can afflict both rich and poor, and which the researchers define as "a value system that is preoccupied with possessions and the social image they project", is both socially destructive and self-destructive. It smashes the happiness and peace of mind of those who succumb to it. It's associated with anxiety, depression and broken relationships.

There has long been a correlation observed between materialism, a lack of empathy and engagement with others, and unhappiness. But research conducted over the past few years seems to show causation. For example, a series of studies published in the journal Motivation and Emotion in July showed that as people become more materialistic, their wellbeing (good relationships, autonomy, sense of purpose and the rest) diminishes. As they become less materialistic, it rises.

In one study, the researchers tested a group of 18-year-olds, then re-tested them 12 years later. They were asked to rank the importance of different goals – jobs, money and status on one side, and self-acceptance, fellow feeling and belonging on the other. They were then given a standard diagnostic test to identify mental health problems. At the ages of both 18 and 30, materialistic people were more susceptible to disorders. But if in that period they became less materialistic, they became happier.

In another study, the psychologists followed Icelanders weathering their country's economic collapse. Some people became more focused on materialism, in the hope of regaining lost ground. Others responded by becoming less interested in money and turning their attention to family and community life. The first group reported lower levels of wellbeing, the second group higher levels.

These studies, while suggestive, demonstrate only correlation. But the researchers then put a group of adolescents through a church programme designed to steer children away from spending and towards sharing and saving. The self-esteem of materialistic children on the programme rose significantly, while that of materialistic children in the control group fell. Those who had little interest in materialism before the programme experienced no change in self-esteem.

Another paper, published in Psychological Science, found that people in a controlled experiment who were repeatedly exposed to images of luxury goods, to messages that cast them as consumers rather than citizens and to words associated with materialism (such as buy, status, asset and expensive), experienced immediate but temporary increases in material aspirations, anxiety and depression. They also became more competitive and more selfish, had a reduced sense of social responsibility and were less inclined to join in demanding social activities. The researchers point out that, as we are repeatedly bombarded with such images through advertisements, and constantly described by the media as consumers, these temporary effects could be triggered more or less continuously.

A third paper, published (paradoxically) in the Journal of Consumer Research, studied 2,500 people for six years. It found a two-way relationship between materialism and loneliness: materialism fosters social isolation; isolation fosters materialism. People who are cut off from others attach themselves to possessions. This attachment in turn crowds out social relationships.

The two varieties of materialism that have this effect – using possessions as a yardstick of success and seeking happiness through acquisition – are the varieties that seem to be on display on Rich Kids of Instagram. It was only after reading this paper that I understood why those photos distressed me: they look like a kind of social self-mutilation.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons an economic model based on perpetual growth continues on its own terms to succeed, though it may leave a trail of unpayable debts, mental illness and smashed relationships. Social atomisation may be the best sales strategy ever devised, and continuous marketing looks like an unbeatable programme for atomisation.

Materialism forces us into comparison with the possessions of others, a race both cruelly illustrated and crudely propelled by that toxic website. There is no end to it. If you have four Rolexes while another has five, you are a Rolex short of contentment. The material pursuit of self-esteem reduces your self-esteem.

I should emphasise that this is not about differences between rich and poor: the poor can be as susceptible to materialism as the rich. It is a general social affliction, visited upon us by government policy, corporate strategy, the collapse of communities and civic life, and our acquiescence in a system that is eating us from the inside out.

This is the dreadful mistake we are making: allowing ourselves to believe that having more money and more stuff enhances our wellbeing, a belief possessed not only by those poor deluded people in the pictures, but by almost every member of almost every government. Worldly ambition, material aspiration, perpetual growth: these are a formula for mass unhappiness.

Happiness: the silver lining of economic stagnation?

A study suggests that national wellbeing peaks at £22k average income. But that doesn't mean there's no point in pushing for wealth

• 
• • Julian Baggini
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 28 November 2013 16.56 GMT

More money, more problems? Photograph: Roger Tooth for the Guardian

It's time to rewrite the story of the financial crisis. Far from being a disaster movie, it was in fact a tale of salvation. As for the green shoots of recovery we are now seeing, they are virulent weeds to be stamped out.

That would seem to be the conclusion to draw from a new study that suggests ever-rising national wealth is the source of decreased life satisfaction. Looking at data from around the world, Warwick University's Eugenio Proto and Aldo Rustichini of University of Minnesota conclude that average wellbeing rises with average income only up to around £22k per head per annum. After that, it slips back again. Britain is more or less at that sweet spot, which suggests economic stagnation may be an excellent way of avoiding the problems of poverty without acquiring the problems of wealth.

You may well be sceptical. Even the authors acknowledge that many people "still prefer to live in richer countries, even if this would result in a decreased level of life satisfaction". In other words, people are overall more satisfied by less life satisfaction, which suggests we should take the whole concept of "life satisfaction" with a pinch of salt.

Any attempt to measure wellbeing in a robust way is fraught with problems. One of the most obvious is that people naturally rank their contentment relative to what appears to be a reasonable expectation, and that varies with time and place. That's why, when offered to rank their life satisfaction a scale of one to 10, most choose around seven or eight, irrespective of era or nation.

Even setting aside these doubts, there are more important reasons to be cautious about how we interpret the data. What it does appear to show, and which almost all studies support, is that having a low income is more of a problem that having a high one is a benefit. From a public policy point of view, that suggests the priority should continue to be raising the life chances of the worst off, not those of the better off, or even the "squeezed middle".

If we achieved that, is it really the case that there would be no point in then increasing wealth even more? Not so fast. We have to ask what explains the levelling-off in perceived quality of life. Proto and Rustichini suggest that the key is "higher GDP leads to higher aspirations … driven by the existence of more opportunities or by comparison with the Joneses". But this "sets up a race between aspiration and realisation; when realisation is lower than aspiration, the psychological cost paid is disappointment". Worse, this creates a feedback loop, as the let-down further widens the aspiration-realisation gap.

What should be clear is that this is not an inevitable consequence of greater wealth. Some individuals learn to treat their material comfort as a blessing and are not concerned by the prospect that they could have yet more, or that others already do. The materialist treadmill is not one we are obliged to get on once we reach a certain level of income.

In short, the problem is explained by the familiar idea that money is not valuable in itself, but only for what it can do. The failure of western societies to convert greater wealth into greater wellbeing is in essence a failure to use our wealth wisely. This should not surprise us. The majority of people alive today and throughout history have not been accustomed to plenty. Humanity is on a steep learning curve and many of the lessons we need to learn go against our natural tendency to acquire first and ask questions later.

That's why the debate about the relative merits of increased GDP and "gross domestic happiness" are misguided. They are not mutually exclusive options. The optimal strategy would be one in which we grew wealth but harnessed it better to enable people to really flourish, rather than just have more stuff. What we should be afraid of is the pointless march of a narrow materialism, not the resumption of economic growth in itself. A richer world in which the money was well spent is something with which we should all be well satisfied.

The drugs do work, but they can't cure unhappiness

Antidepressants are sometimes prescribed when they aren't needed, but never to use them is to miss an opportunity

• Tim Cantopher
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 20 November 2013 16.20 GMT

Antidepressants buy you time to sort out the issues that caused the depression in the first place. Photograph: Cultura/Rex Features

I can't stand zealots. Unfortunately, the literature on antidepressants is full of them. I'm not impressed by the protagonists in the polarised argument over the efficacy or otherwise of these drugs, whose positions are firmly held and loudly proclaimed. Many researchers appear to have written the conclusion of their study before the protocol.

At the one pole are the pharmaceutical industry and academic psychopharmacologists. I'll call them the pros. They urge us to practise only evidence-based medicine, by which they mean following rigid protocols based on treatments that have achieved positive results either in double-blind placebo-controlled drug trials, or meta-analyses (a method for grouping together results from several trials). Most of these studies focus on antidepressants because their effects are easy to measure.

The pros despise any practice not based on this narrow definition of evidence. One of them once told me: "Employing clinical experience to decide how to treat patients means continuing to make the same mistakes and never learning from them." So much for the lessons I've learned from treating about 3,000 people with this illness.

At the other pole are a group of naysayers who assert that antidepressants don't work any better than placebo. I'll call them the cons. They use the available statistics in the way best suited to their argument and are equally dismissive of any contrary view.

It's part of our culture to take up polarised positions. Our political and legal systems are based on this premise and our media rely on it. The middle ground isn't interesting and is rarely aired. It is this environment in which the pros and cons dominate the literature on antidepressants. Meanwhile, sufferers from the depressive illness don't know which way to turn.

The root of the problem is that good research is difficult and limited. Research is good at showing big effects in large groups of people. It's not so good at showing more subtle, or difficult to define, effects in subgroups of people. The results of your study will depend on whom you study, what you measure, what you define as an effect and what you do with your data.

The cons say that the pros have suppressed some findings that didn't suit them. If you compare two identical groups 20 times, you will find an apparently significant difference between them once. Test your ineffective antidepressant 20 times and you'll be able to publish a positive result, so long as you suppress the other 19. We clinicians knew this was happening years ago. One particular antidepressant was known by everyone to lack efficacy, yet the studies appeared to show that it worked as well as all the rest. Something was wrong with the published research and it seems we may now know what it was. Recent research seems to under-report some side-effects and withdrawal effects of antidepressants.

The cons are equally selective. They point to meta-analyses showing that antidepressants don't out-perform placebo sufficiently to reach this arbitrary level of significance. They conclude that antidepressants don't work. This is the oldest misuse of statistics in the book. An insignificant difference doesn't mean that you've proven no difference; it just means that you haven't proved that there is one.

Another issue is failing to exclude the outlier. As I've already pointed out, one expects occasional misleading results from research. A meta-analysis should deal with this problem by excluding from the analysis any study with results wildly different from all the others. The pros say that this hasn't always happened in the cons' analyses, potentially producing misleadingly negative results.

So research is failing us in this field. Unfashionable though this is in the environment currently existing in medicine, it means we clinicians need to use our experience, powers of observation and common sense, bearing in mind the experience of other clinicians.

We need to take note of the available research, while also taking a critical view of it. Here is the upshot, accepted by most of us on the ground: antidepressants usually work, but only for real clinical depression, the type involving a chemical disturbance in the brain, with a full range of characteristic physical symptoms. They don't work for unhappiness, grief or chemically induced depression and if you take them irregularly or for too short a period, the depression comes back.

Prescription numbers are rising mainly because doctors are getting better at identifying depression, though antidepressants are sometimes prescribed when they aren't needed and won't work. Except for people suffering from recurrent depression they are only first aid, buying you time to sort out the issues that caused the depression in the first place, but never to use them is to miss an opportunity to provide relief from this horrible illness.

Dr Tim Cantopher, consultant psychiatrist, Priory Hospitals Group, author of Depressive Illness – the Curse of the Strong (Sheldon)

How does a polyamorous relationship between four people work?

BBC News 19 Aug 2013

Imagine one house, with four people, but five couples. How does it work, asks Jo Fidgen.

Charlie is talking excitedly about a first date she went on the night before.

Next to her on the sofa is her husband of six years, Tom. And on the other side of him is Sarah, who's been in a relationship with Tom for the last five years. Sarah's fiance, Chris, is in the kitchen making a cup of tea.

The two women are also in a full-blown relationship, while the two men are just good friends. Together, they make a polyamorous family and share a house in Sheffield.

"We're planning to grow old together," says Charlie.

Polyamory is the practice of having simultaneous intimate relationships with more than one person at a time, with the knowledge and consent of all partners. The term entered the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2006, and such relationships are rare enough that Tom finds himself having to account for his personal situation time and time again.

"The number of conversations I've had with peers where I've started to explain it and they've got as far as, 'so, you all cheat on each other' and not been able to get past that. I've said no, everybody's cool with it, everybody knows what's happening, no one's deceiving each other."

If any of the four want to get involved with someone else, they have to run it by the others - all of whom have a veto.

"We can't use a veto for something as silly as, say, personal taste," says Sarah. "If you were dating somebody and I could not understand why you found them attractive, that would not be sufficient reason for me to say, no, you can't see this person."

What counts as infidelity, then?

"Lying," they chorus.

"For example," explains Charlie, "before I went on this first date yesterday, I sat down with each of my three partners and checked with them individually that I was okay to go on this date. Cheating would have been me sneaking off and saying I was meeting Friend X and not say that it was a potential romantic partner."

The rules and boundaries of their relationships are carefully negotiated.

When they had been a couple for just two weeks, Tom suggested to Charlie that they be non-monogamous.

"It was a light bulb moment for me," she says. 'I had been scared of commitment because I had never met anyone I felt I could fall completely and exclusively in love with. The idea of this not being a monogamous relationship allowed me to fall as deeply in love with Tom as I wanted to without fear that I would break his heart by falling in love with somebody else as well."

But how did she feel when, a year into their marriage, Tom fell in love with another woman?

"Well, Sarah's lovely," says Charlie. "I was just so happy that Tom was happy with her."

Sarah's partner, Chris, was less comfortable with the situation at first. They had agreed that they could have other sexual partners, but forming an emotional attachment with someone else was a different matter.

So when Sarah fell for Tom, she agonised over how to tell Chris.

"We sat down and talked about what it meant to be in love with more than one person, and did that mean I loved him less. Well, of course it didn't.

"It's not like there's only so much love I have to give and I have to give all of it to one person. I can love as many people as I can fit in my heart and it turns out that's quite a few."

Chris and Tom bonded over video games and became firm friends. Before long, Chris had fallen in love with Tom's wife, Charlie.

"It had never crossed Chris's mind not to be monogamous - now he says he could never go back," says Sarah.

This quandary over how to manage relationships is something that couples counsellor, Esther Perel, sees people struggling with all the time.

"You can live in a monogamous institution and you can negotiate monotony, or you can live in a non-monogamous choice and negotiate jealousy. Pick your evil.

"If you are opening it up you have to contend with the fact that you're not the only one, and if you are not opening it up then you have to contend with the fact that your partner is the only one."

So how do Charlie, Sarah and Tom handle jealousy?

Not a problem, they insist, and point to a word invented in polyamorous circles to indicate the opposite feeling.

"Compersion," explains Tom, "is the little warm glow that you get when you see somebody you really care about loving somebody else and being loved."

"There's always a small amount of insecurity," reflects Sarah, recalling how she felt when her fiance fell in love with Charlie. "But compare my small amount of discomfort with the huge amount of love that I could see in both of them, and honestly, I'd feel like a really mean person if I said my discomfort was more important than their happiness."

Jealousy has to be handled differently in a polyamorous relationship, adds Charlie.

"In a two-person, monogamous relationship, it's not necessary but it is possible to say, we just need to cut out all of the people who are causing jealousy and then everything will be fine.

"Whereas when you are committed to a multi-partner relationship, you can't just take that shortcut. You have to look at the reasons behind the jealousy."

If an issue does arise, the four may stay up all night talking it over.

"We do so much more talking than sex," laughs Charlie.

But some argue that it is natural for people to bond in pairs.

Our desire for monogamy has deep roots, says Marian O'Connor, a psychosexual therapist at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships in London.

"As children we need someone who loves us best of all in order to thrive. There's normally one main care giver, usually the mother, who will look after the infant.

"The thing about a monogamous relationship, it can give you some sense of certainty and surety, somewhere you can feel safe and at home."

Sarah, Tom and Charlie agree that a safe base is important, but see no reason why only monogamy can provide one.

"I feel safe and secure, with the ability to trust and grow, with Tom, Sarah and Chris," says Charlie. "It is from the base and security of the three of them that I face the world and the challenges the day brings."

"The way I see it, it's only a problem if I feel like one of my partners is spending more time with all their other partners than with me," says Sarah. "It just leads to people feeling hurt."

A shared Google calendar is the answer.

"We mostly use it for keeping track of date nights," says Charlie. "The couple who is on a date gets first pick of what film goes on the TV and it helps keep track of who's in what bedroom."

Sarah chips in. "So, for example, I have a weekly date night with Charlie. It's us snuggling up, us with the TV, us going to bed together and all that kind of business."

Perel sees polyamory as "the next frontier" - a way of avoiding having to choose between monotony and jealousy.

"We have a generation of people coming up who are saying, we also want stability and committed relationships and safety and security, but we also want individual fulfilment. Let us see if we can negotiate monogamy or non-monogamy in a consensual way that prevents a lot of the destructions and pains of infidelity."

But it's not an easy option.

"We get funny looks in the street," says Sarah.

"And every time you out yourself, you risk losing a friend," adds Charlie. "I'm preparing for 30 years of being made fun of."

Tom is cautiously optimistic that polyamory will become "average and everyday".

"Anyone who is expecting some massive social change overnight is terribly mistaken, but it will happen."

In the meantime, the four of them are planning an unofficial ceremony to mark their commitment to each other.

"Sometimes people just write the relationship off as a lazy way of getting more sex than you normally would. There are easier ways," says Tom wryly.

They all agree managing a multi-partner relationship can be exhausting.

"But we don't have a choice. We're in love with each other," they chime.

Don’t think you have to shout loudest to find happiness in life

TERENCE BLACKER in The Independent

 

Monday 3 June 2013

The role models here are ruthless figures like Sir Alan Sugar or the sneering bosses on Dragon's Den. There is, boys and girls, another way - one that shuns the limelight

In pursuit of the great god Growth, the Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, has been urging a new spirit of thrust and entrepreneurial hunger upon girls and young women.

Following the publication of a report by the Women’s Business Council, which estimated that if a million more women become entrepreneurs, the nation’s productivity would increase by 10 per cent in 17 years, the Government is to take action. An advice pack for girls is to be sent to all primary schools.

“A vital part of future career success is the aspirations that girls have early in their lives,” Ms Miller has said, and that sounds sensible enough. Who, after all, would not want members of the next generation to live up to their potential?

If only it were not for the niggling suspicion that the Government has a particular and limited view of what constitutes aspiration. Career success is increasingly perceived in the way it is presented on television – as a matter of power, money and visibility. The aspirational models for schoolchildren are ruthless, kickass bosses like Alan Sugar or Mary Portas or the panel of smug, sneering bullies on Dragons’ Den.

There is, girls and boys, another way. Politicians and other public figures may find it hard to believe, but the greatest achievements are not necessarily those reflected by fame, visibility and power over the lives of others. Some people, women and men, not only derive more satisfaction working away from the limelight but often accomplish more than those who are centre stage.

I’ve been reminded recently of how much can be achieved by a subtle, indirect, collaborative kind of power when reading a newly published memoir, Fiz: and some Theatre Giants, by Eleanor Fazan, a director and choreographer who is something of a legendary figure in the theatre but is relatively – and contentedly – unknown in the wider world. Now in her eighties, “Fiz”, as she is known, has had an extraordinary career working at a high level with an impressive, varied list of brilliantly talented, often difficult men, from the music-hall star George Robey to Herbert von Karajan and including, among others, Lindsay Anderson, Alan Bennett, John Schlesinger , Barry Humphries and Laurence Olivier.

It was Fiz who, in 1961, directed Beyond the Fringe, turning a 55-minute student revue at the Edinburgh Fringe into a full-length show which triumphed in the West End and Broadway. I first met her when I was writing the biography of Willie Donaldson, who produced Beyond the Fringe, and discovered that she had written unpublished essays, now included in Fiz, about working with Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore, and a portrait of Willie himself.

What was striking about her insights into these complicated men was that they were utterly individual, and often at odds with the accepted view, but always perceptive and interesting.

The extraordinary career described in Eleanor Fazan’s book – a fascinating theatrical memoir in its own right, incidentally – has relevance to Maria Miller’s campaign to raise the aspirations of girls at primary school. Without headlines or shows of aggression and ego, Fiz has clearly contributed more to theatre, dance, opera and cinema than many of the show-boating stars who are now household names. “I have always been drawn towards those who needed to kick up, those who just couldn’t toe the party line,” she writes, and that strength and bloody-mindedness has served her as well as the stars with whom she has worked.

Not everyone finds professional fulfilment being a boss, and pretending that they do, or even that their role is less important than those who get the attention and publicity is misleading and unkind. There is certainly a case for getting primary school-children to aim high when thinking of their futures, but presenting success solely in terms of winning with sharp elbows and competitiveness, as if everyone should aim to be like the deluded, over-ambitious idiots on The Apprentice, is unhelpful.

Girls and boys could learn a more nuanced lesson in career fulfilment: that it is not necessarily those with the loudest voices and on the biggest salaries who achieve most, both for themselves and for the big world beyond.

It’s time to switch off your mobile and set yourself free

Experts have found an effective new formula for happiness - ditching the smartphone

That's enough mobile phones: 'I found myself paying closer attention to the world around me, and having conversations that felt like real conversations' Photo: Bloomberg

By Max Davidson

8:56PM GMT 28 Jan 2013

16 Comments

Will miracles never cease? I learnt yesterday that there is a team of officials in the Cabinet Office known as the Nudge Unit, charged with suggesting “ways people can make small changes to improve their lives”. Naturally, this sent the taxpayer in me into a lather of indignation. No wonder the national debt is so mountainous if crackpot initiatives like this are given the green light in Whitehall.

But then, wonder of wonders, out of the Behavioural Insights Team, as it is formally known, emerged common sense so beautiful and bracing that it was like being nudged by Marilyn Monroe.

Suppose, asks Prof Paul Dolan of the London School of Economics, a former stalwart of the unit, a man who nudges for England, happiness is not owning the latest, smartest mobile phone, but is, in fact, having that phone switched off? Suppose silence truly is golden, a necessary antidote to a shrill, intrusive world?

The problem with smartphones, warns Dolan, an expert on happiness, is that they distract users’ attention from the people around them. “Turning your phone off and enjoying being with your friends is much better for you than constantly checking your phone and emails,” he told an audience at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia.

What? Enjoy the company of your friends when you could be reading tweets from Wayne Rooney or perusing the weather forecast in New York? The professor is flying so much in the face of fashionable opinion that, the next time he switches on his mobile, he may find he has been denounced as a fascist Luddite by the Twitterati. 

But he is hardly a lone voice. He is only articulating something that millions share: a vague sense that our super-connected world is also dangerously disconnected from things that matter.

Switching off your mobile can improve your emotional health – as I found from personal experience last year. I was travelling in the States, left my mobile phone at the hotel and, for the next two hours, felt anxious and disorientated. Suppose something happened to my loved ones? Suppose so-and-so needed to get hold of me? What was happening at the Oval? All the usual neuroses of the middle-aged male.

But then, as sanity returned, the feelings of anxiety abated. After four hours of being cut off from what I had come to regard as civilisation, I felt as relaxed as if I’d had a particularly good lunch. After six hours, I was in such a happy space that, when I finally got back to the hotel and was reunited with my phone, I felt not relief, but resentment. Did my life have to revolve around that little electronic tyrant? Couldn’t its biddings wait?

The next day, and for the following five days, I left my phone in the hotel and resolved to check my messages no more than once a day. If I was late receiving some genuinely urgent communication, so be it.

The result was as dramatic as it was heartening. Until you sever your links with the people you are in touch with 24/7, you don’t realise quite how stressful those links are; quite how much energy you expend fretting about the contents of emails you have or have not received; quite how many footling demands other people will make on your time, if you are stupid enough to let them.

Liberated from those demands, I found myself paying closer attention to the world around me: enjoying the sights and sounds of America, and having conversations that felt like real conversations, flowing easily and sweetly, at no risk of being interrupted by the beep of a phone. It felt like an epiphany, an unexpected reversion to a better, simpler lifestyle.

Prof Dolan, guru of contentment and distinguished graduate of the Nudge Unit, has clearly had similar epiphanies. His plea for reduced dependency on mobile phones throws down the gauntlet to a generation that, in its fascination with new technology, has got its priorities askew.

One of the defining images of the 21st century is rows of men in suits on aeroplanes switching on their phones within nanoseconds of their planes landing. They have mistaken ergonomic efficiency for coolness: they think they are demonstrating energy and dynamism. They cannot see how pathetic they look, clutching at the umbilical cord that links them to their bosses/girlfriends/bookmakers.

The next time they land at Heathrow, they should try waiting five minutes before switching on their mobiles. Then 10 minutes. Then 20. It could be the saving of them.