Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science in the Department in Psychological and Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is an expert on happiness, its causes and consequences, and author of "Happiness by Design" and "Happy Ever After".
In your work on happiness, you break it down into two basic categories: pleasure and purpose. Humanity has often located purpose within systems of faith. What about in a non-religious world?
The search for purpose is important, but not set it up in a way that becomes preachy or sanctimonious. I mean, people get purpose from gardening or, you know, looking after the dog. In Happiness by Design, I make a case for how happy lives are ones that find the right balance for that person between things that are pleasurable and things that are purposeful. And I think we all know people that have that balance out of kilter – not as we would judge them, but that they are just consuming more of one than the other than that would make them happy. And that balance is going to be different across individuals. It's for each of us to kind of work out what that balance should be.
Your last book, Happy Ever After: Escaping the Myth of the Perfect Life, was published in 2019, and caused quite a storm – particularly your comments at the Hay literary festival that year around research indicating that women benefit less from marriage and having children than men do. Why did those comments cause such an uproar, and what has happened since?
It was such an irony, because I was talking about how people get really affected by these [social] narratives [around happiness] and how we really do judge the lives that other people lead according to some of these stories. And then I said that single child free women are doing perfectly well, the last thing they probably need is a husband and children. And it causes this massive storm. It was like, well, this is exactly this is exactly the point of the book. We really don’t like others who don’t play by the rules.
Okay, there are some studies showing that if you play by the rules and don't win, then that's okay. But if you don't want to play by the rules, that's really bad. So if women are trying to find a husband, and want to have children, that's okay, because at least they're trying. But if you actively say “I do not want to marry, I do not want to have children”, then people judge you really harshly for that.
The fallout was quite extraordinary. But I also get lots of mostly complimentary emails from single childfree women who say thank you. Another really important significant shift in my own way of thinking has been in my use of language. I used “childless” before as a term. And now I use the word “childfree”. There's a very different connotation to it.
You also point out research indicating that many people simply don't trust single childfree women when they say that they're happy. But maybe they have a point? Can self-reporting happiness be a reliable source of data?
I celebrate subjectivity. I don’t say, “Oh, well, it's all subjective,” and therefore it doesn't mean anything. What we want to do is approach these things from different angles with lots of different data sets, different ways of observing the same thing. But the fundamental point is that our lives are lived through subjective experiences, they are our interpretations of the world, and our feelings associated with those interpretations. So we ought to be doing much more to directly assess that.
On that theme of subjectivity, you've written about how our own happiness is dependent on how we judge that of others. Many people have said that, during the pandemic, they compared themselves to others less. Will that have any lasting effect?
On the lasting effect question, most things don't affect us for anywhere near as long as we think they might. Our memories are very short. When we’re in the midst of something, it will often feel really significant and important and life-changing – a pandemic, or maybe a health shock – we think, “okay, this is going to change my life, I'm going to change my perspective on everything”. Very quickly, we forget.
Having said that, things are never simple. The pandemic did go on for a long time, longer than anyone anticipated. So it would be surprising if there weren’t any lasting effects. Certainly, some of the ways in which we might compare ourselves to other people, what they're doing with their lives, were changed significantly for a short while. But now people are quickly back to comparing themselves to other people in all sorts of ways that are sometimes good for us, but not always good for us, and probably on balance harmful – particularly when we're comparing ourselves to the idealised lives of others, competing through Instagram posts or social media posts.
We were also forced to confront our mortality, and you’ve talked about the importance of that.
I do talk a little bit about this in Happy Ever After in the chapter on health. We have become obsessed with longevity. I mean, this is a horrible thing to say about dying – because, of course, when loved ones die, it clearly has a significant impact on those affected – but we've become greedy and selfish about it. The pandemic was actually a real opportunity to have a very honest discussion about death and dying. Because, I mean, it is going to happen, right? It's just a question of when and how. Those when and how questions are really, really important.
When someone's 98-year-old grandmother dies, it's not tragic. It's sad, but it's not tragic. But we heard language during the pandemic, like “every death is a tragedy”. And I just don't think that's true. And I don't think that's helpful. You know, it's tragic when children die, it’s tragic when young people die. When the process of dying is awful as well, that's the how, you know.
I think it was a massive missed opportunity. We just became scared and fearful. And it was existential. We missed an opportunity to have a grown-up conversation.
Are you in favour of assisted dying?
I had actually started out with the view that many people hold, which is that it's potentially a kind of slippery slope – that if you allow it in some limited cases, then it can become the norm and people might pressurise relatives into ending their life sooner than they might want to. And the slippery slope argument was one that I found quite compelling, I have to admit. But as I looked more into it for research on [Happy Ever After], I saw how very regulated and very controlled the process of assisted dying is in all the countries where it’s practiced - the Netherlands, Belgium. So I concluded that it was safe in the sense that we [in Britain] would put the proper regulatory framework in place that would, insofar as it's possible, ensure that the cases of assisted dying were really genuinely ones where people's welfare was going to be improved by doing it. So I've become an advocate of assisted dying, over this last little while.
There are many things that are awful. But it's hard to think of anything worse than being in such an awful state where everybody agrees that this is a life that should be ended, but you would end up in prison if you were to assist someone in doing that. That's just wrong.
What is the role of reason in all this?
Logic and reason can sometimes sound very cold and calculating. When you make moral claims, like “every death is a tragedy, we will fight that at all costs, we will spend whatever is required,” it sounds like you’ve set yourself up to a very high moral standard. When you say, “we should be judging costs and benefits, we should be responding proportionately to challenges”, it sounds a bit weak in comparison, it can kind of make you sound a little less nice. But actually, of course, the harm caused by setting up these moral principles is much, much greater than by really properly facing up to the challenges of costs and benefits.
You've also suggested that people adopt a more compassionate approach to life
I've argued for compassion over empathy, as other people have. I'm not the first person to do that, and other people have done it more rigorously. But we don't want to crowd out empathetic behaviours, with an emphasis on the more calculating compassion. Because a lot of what we do will be driven by emotion, by the regard that we hold others in, in relation to how we imagine feeling if we were in those situations. So it is a bit more complicated than just [advocating] compassion at the exclusion of empathy. Because we don't want to crowd out people doing good deeds based on an emotional response.
You propose in Happiness by Design that, instead of thinking all the time about what might make us happy, and trying to exercise our will power, people should design their everyday life and environment to make it easier and simpler to do the things that make them happy. Do you think it’s easier or harder to do that, now that more people are working from home?
There’s an analogy about different medical drugs that people might take. You might have a drug that you can take any time during the day, and one that you have to take at breakfast. Now, on the face of it, of course, the former drug is better than the latter. But it's more likely that you would be better off with the drug that has to be taking the morning, because you'd get into a habit of taking it at the same time every day. A world of constraint is meant to be limiting for us, right? But actually, constraints can sometimes be liberating, because it allows habits to form and we don’t have to pay attention or energy to deciding when we do certain things. So I think it is a challenge for people that have jobs where they can work from home and do the hours that they want.
Is there anything else we should bear in mind about happiness, in our new post-pandemic world?
I think we will look back and think “what the hell were we doing?”. We were causing so much more harm than we were generating benefits. We will see some of the enormous costs of lockdowns come to bear and I just can't help but think how much harm we did to young people – not just children in schools, but young adults, by literally stripping away what we know is hugely significant for life – life expectancy, let alone life fixed life experience – which is social contact. Loneliness is one of the biggest killers. It's up there with smoking, right? If you have to give health interventions to improve life expectancy, you will definitely [address] loneliness before you tackle many of the other things that we've tackled in health. I think just understanding some of those causal effects is going to be really important, so that we can learn lessons for future pandemics, because we're bound to face another crisis at some point.
What are you focusing on now?
So I did a podcast at the LSE last year, the Duck Rabbit podcast, which is about polarisation, how we naturally want to surround ourselves with people that agree with us. And now I'm writing a book, with the working title Taking Sides, which is also about polarisation – not political polarisation necessarily, or only, but just more generally about why we find the difficult to listen to people that disagree and how we could re-design it. But I want to sort of do for polarisation. So think about how we could design environments to make it easier for us to listen to others, because we're not going to do it naturally. We're not going to do it by telling ourselves that we should listen to people that disagree. We're going to do it by organising our lives and our environments in ways that make it easier for us to do that. So that's my next project.
Will that involve looking at encouraging social contact, within the concept of design?
I think so. It is definitely going to be about how we can bring different communities together. And also particularly across the generations. I'm really interested in that. It's the biggest apartheid, really. Most young people only know their grandparents and most old people only know their grandkids and that's it. There's very little intergenerational conversation. I'd like to get more of that dialogue going. It’s exciting.
