Some peo­ple wak­ing up this morn­ing are go­ing to be hap­py. Hope­ful­ly, it is most of the na­tion. We could do with some hap­pi­ness.

On Sat­ur­day morn­ing, as I came down my street with my wife af­ter our neigh­bour­hood walk, I passed a mid­dle-aged man stand­ing out­side his car. I did not know him. I raised my hand in salute, smiled and said, “Good morn­ing.” He stared at me for a mo­ment and turned his back.

We could do with some hap­pi­ness.

There is some­thing called a ‘Coun­try Hap­pi­ness In­dex’. It’s a three-year av­er­age de­ter­mined by analysing Gallup polling da­ta from most of the world’s coun­tries in six cat­e­gories: gross do­mes­tic prod­uct per capi­ta, so­cial sup­port, healthy life ex­pectan­cy, free­dom to make your own choic­es, gen­eros­i­ty of the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion and per­cep­tions of in­ter­nal and ex­ter­nal cor­rup­tion lev­els.

T&T ranks 70th in hap­pi­ness out of 147 coun­tries based on the 2024 World Hap­pi­ness Re­port, falling 32 places, com­pared to the last avail­able re­port in 2017.

We could do with some hap­pi­ness.

Af­ter the age of 60 or so, when some of life’s de­sires have ei­ther been sat­is­fied or are not as ur­gent as they once were, one does start won­der­ing about hap­pi­ness. How im­por­tant is it? How does one get there? How long can a body be hap­py? What is more im­por­tant for hap­pi­ness, mon­ey or your health? Se­cu­ri­ty? Friends? Fam­i­ly? A car­ing gov­ern­ment? A bot­tle of rum?

There seem to be two dif­fer­ent kinds of hap­pi­ness. Both equal. Both need­ed.

Lev­el One hap­pi­ness is the kind of plea­sure you get from com­ing first in test, eat­ing a pip­ing hot shrimp roti or sip­ping a good rum. That’s a plea­sur­able state that tends to be in­tense, but tem­po­rary. It gen­er­al­ly lasts around 15 min­utes.

There is an­oth­er kind of hap­pi­ness called Lev­el Two hap­pi­ness. It is the kind of sat­is­fac­tion and con­tent­ment you may feel when you look at your life and think about past achieve­ments and the gen­er­al di­rec­tion that your life is head­ing. That form of hap­pi­ness is less in­tense than Lev­el One hap­pi­ness, but is longer last­ing.

In­ter­est­ing­ly, both forms of hap­pi­ness are in some con­flict with each oth­er. Too much of one may lessen the oth­er. Yet, both are need­ed and com­ple­ment each oth­er.

What are the so­cial or per­son­al con­di­tions that are need­ed to make peo­ple hap­pi­er?

There seem to be five main things: mon­ey, men­tal health, a se­cure and lov­ing pri­vate life, a se­cure com­mu­ni­ty and moral val­ues.

It’s pret­ty clear that pro­vid­ed you’ve got at least a rea­son­able in­come, mon­ey by it­self does not make you hap­pi­er.

Over the past 60 years, most Tri­nis have got bet­ter homes, pret­ti­er clothes, more cars and de­spite the set­backs, bet­ter health­care. Yet, hap­pi­ness has not in­creased in T&T.

Things which make us want more in­come make us less hap­py. Ad­ver­tis­ing and so­cial me­dia make peo­ple less and less sat­is­fied with what they’ve got and the ef­fect is par­tic­u­lar­ly detri­men­tal where chil­dren are con­cerned.

Men­tal ill­ness in T&T is a scan­dal. Rough­ly 25 per cent of us ex­pe­ri­ence se­ri­ous men­tal ill­ness dur­ing our lives, and about 15 per cent ex­pe­ri­ence ma­jor de­pres­sion. Sales of an­ti­de­pres­sants are at an all-time high. Yet no one talks about it as a cause of un­hap­pi­ness.

For most peo­ple, val­ued per­son­al re­la­tion­ships with fam­i­ly, col­leagues, friends and neigh­bours are the best guar­an­tee of hap­pi­ness. Peo­ple are hap­pi­er and bet­ter able to func­tion when they feel they can trust oth­er peo­ple.

In a re­cent WHO sur­vey, 11 to 15-year-olds were asked ‘Do you agree with the state­ment that most of the stu­dents in my class­es are kind and help­ful?’ Some of the an­swers by coun­try were: Swe­den, 77 per cent yes; Ger­many, 76 per cent; Den­mark, 73 per cent; USA, 53 per cent; Rus­sia, 46 per cent; Eng­land, 43 per cent.

It’s in­ter­est­ing that fig­ures for hap­pi­ness in these very same coun­tries are quite sim­i­lar.

Through­out the world, and we are now see­ing this in Trinidad for the first time, the pro­por­tion of peo­ple who say “Yes!”, when asked: “can most peo­ple be trust­ed?” has fall­en dra­mat­i­cal­ly.

Crime is di­rect­ly re­lat­ed to the lev­el of mu­tu­al trust in a com­mu­ni­ty. In­se­cure com­mu­ni­ties make for un­hap­py peo­ple.

The phi­los­o­phy of in­di­vid­u­al­ism, “en­ti­tle­ment,” the idea that you are en­ti­tled to the good things in life and that your main du­ty in life is to make the most of your­self and get the most that you can from so­ci­ety, al­so seems to have tak­en over our idea of the good life.

“Giv­ing back” is not some­thing that res­onates in our is­land so­ci­ety.

But friend­ship, vol­un­tary work and re­mark­ably, danc­ing, gen­er­ate more joy in hu­mans than any­thing else. It takes lead­er­ship to point that out and lead­er­ship is scarce in T&T these days.