Tania Ahsan

All of society conspires to keep people miserable. We, in the developed world, live in capitalist societies that are now exporting our consumer malaise to the developing world. We have ceased to be considered communities of people and have become individual consumers. Our family units and friends are only important to society insofar as they represent an extended retail opportunity in the guise of birthdays and Christmases and Valentines. Is that an extremely pessimistic view of society? You bet it is, but try to step out of the box and you’ll see how hard it is to avoid this analysis.

              For example each Christmas, in my office I receive a card from every person and their dog, irrespective of whether I’ve said two words to them all year. I am expected to return these cards with ones of my own. This means a solid couple of hours buying and writing cards until my hands hurt and the only message given is a scrawled one stating who it’s to and who it’s from.

              There is little joy in the ritual and little joy in the receiving as individual cards get drowned in the avalanche. So one year I emailed everyone saying that I was making a donation to charity instead of sending cards because I believed it was money better spent. ‘You could always get charity cards,’ I was told. Others, I know, doubted I had ever made the charity donation and believed I was just being lazy or cheap. I had broken the rules. The rules are that we make ourselves miserable and sick doing things we’re ‘meant’ to do.

            And the funny thing is that I would probably feel rather bereft if I didn’t receive a bunch of cards at Christmas from people I hardly know. I would feel unpopular and unloved. That is the beauty of the system. We self-regulate ourselves into becoming unquestioning consumers.

           We are also constrained by the censure of society around us from having fun that doesn’t involve money. Don't believe me? Try simply skipping down a road. Nothing more subversive than simply remembering what skipping felt like as a child and doing it as an adult.

I guarantee you will get many horrified gawks. People will cross the road to avoid you and will most definitely believe that you’re in some way soft in the head. Wear fresh flowers in your hair (yes, even the boys) and you’ll get mocked or so studiously ignored that you won’t be able to ask someone the time for love nor money. Hug a tree. Smile at strangers. Blow bubbles with your chewing gum.

These are not acts that we are allowed to do as adults, although we are allowed to spend ludicrous sums of money standing for hours in queues at theme parks, apparently in order to have ‘fun’. Society exerts considerable social control in order to ensure that we don’t engage in any free frivolous activity. Society, as it currently stands, would be dealt a severe blow if more people found ways to have fun that didn’t involve spending vast amounts of money. Society monitors itself and checks heretics and subversives and aims to put them in neat little pigeonholes labelled ‘eccentrics’ or ‘hippies’ or ‘nutters’. Above all, society is anti-fun.

Did you know you could be arrested for having too much fun? A recent case was reported in which a French tourist was arrested in Finland for rolling in pristine fresh snow. Neighbours called the police when they saw the man rolling delightedly in the snow and the man’s lack of Finnish meant he couldn’t explain what he was doing nor produce ID for the police. The police said they thought a warm cell was the best thing for him.

You may think how revolutionary was this free spirit in that he followed his instinct to roll in the snow. But really even he was following convention set down in stone. He was a tourist. It is only on holidays that we permit ourselves to act a little ‘crazy’. Hence the hedonistic excess of clubbing resorts on the Med. People behave there in ways they would be much too inhibited to behave in if they were at home. They indulge in orgiastic acts of excess in order to cram as much experience as possible into their appointed two weeks of freedom twice a year. They work at jobs they hate for 48 weeks of the year to get the time and money to have a fortnight away bi-annually and so the safety valve is released and no great revolution hits the streets of Britain or other such developed nations. Nobody demands fun and joy as an inalienable human right.

People, this is no way to live! Are you putting up with a job you hate? Do you drink too much or eat too much or take too many drugs to numb the sheer ennui and stress of modern living? Can you see yourself in this picture? If so, you’re not alone. In the UK alone, stress accounts for 90 million working days lost each year. We are making ourselves sick through worry and unhappiness. It is most definitely not entirely of our own making as our fiercely consumerist society forces the act of senseless consumption and ever-burgeoning debt down our throats.

We work harder and harder to buy more and more and we feel more and more disconnected from our loved ones and our communities as a whole. It really is a crazy treadmill that we continue pumping away at relentlessly, unaware that we’re not getting anywhere. But, before you groan and bury your head deeper in the sand and say that there’s nothing you can do about the world at large, take a deep breath and relax! There’s plenty you personally have power over. You may not have the power to change society as a whole but you have absolute power over your own mind. Your mind is your tool toward salvation from the horrors of modern life. You can be happy and you can connect with the world around you through the act of living your life the way you always wanted it to be as a child, before the ‘can’ts’ and ‘shoulds’ of life took over and hijacked your desires.

And your desires are where you can begin to reclaim your life and happiness. One of the greatest contributing factors to a lack of happiness is a lack of satisfaction in life. Satisfaction can only come from knowing what you want and attaining it. We no longer know what we want. We assume that the things that magazines and TV shows and films tell us are desirable are what is really desirable. So we attempt to find the perfect job, the perfect partner, the perfect house with the perfect accessories and the perfect car in the perfect driveway. It is an endless craving for consumption. The problem is that even when we achieve all that we are told we want, we are still dissatisfied and we can’t find a reason or a name for our discontent. I’m not advocating a renunciation of all things material.

Consumption is fine when you’re consuming that which you need and/or love. When I purchased my favourite brown leather biker jacket, I was able to give five coats to charity because I knew that I loved the new jacket so much, I simply wouldn’t be wearing the other coats ever again. Now, buying five biker jackets in different colours would probably be over-consumption and rather excessive as I wouldn’t get to wear them on a regular basis. The exception to this is if collecting jackets is your thing and you get pleasure from seeing them as objects of beauty. So consumption is not a bad thing if it makes you happy but it is a bad thing if it puts you in debt and you never use what you buy.

A way around falling into the trap of unnecessary consumption is to be perfectly clear about what it is that you like and dislike. This is a process that comes at the start of your action plan to bring more happiness into your life. If you don’t know yourself, how can you expect to make yourself happier? So, first things first, figure out what it is that you like and desire. And equally what you dislike and despise.

I despise beetroot. I’ve never liked the taste, the sliminess of peeled beetroot, the way it stains everything and its strange vegetable taste so different from the way you’d expect a nice reddish purple thing to taste. I dislike the deceit of beetroot and I involuntarily find myself sticking my tongue out in disgust at the thought of having to eat it. Luckily as a child, I was never forced to eat that which I didn’t like (as long as I tried it at least once). This meant that I could explore food and establish my likes and dislikes. My tastes changed as I grew older and I came to love the grapefruit juice that I couldn’t stomach as a child. Never did find a place in my heart for beetroot though.

This process of discovering your likes and dislikes is a process of getting to know yourself and it can be a tremendously fun and interesting thing to do. After all, you spend more time with yourself than you do with anyone else so learn who you are. Your most basic likes and dislikes are a part of you – as long you’re being authentic about them. When I say ‘authentic’, I am not indulging in New Age psycho-babble, I am telling you that you need to be sure that you like football because you like it, not because your husband does. That you like opera because you like it and not because your father does. That you like incense because you like it and not because your wife does.

Once you establish how you feel about things, you’ll suddenly find that you become much more interesting. After all, who wants a sheep at a dinner party who waits until he or she sees what the majority think about something before agreeing to it? Far better to have someone committed to a polemical approach to life. Once you examine how you feel about anything and everything, you can assert your opinion with confidence and passion. You can back up your opinions with considered arguments for why you feel that way. Once you begin to respect your own opinion on things, you’ll find that others follow suit and start to respect your views too.

Read part2. For further information on Tania and her work, visit www.taniaahsan.com

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