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Okay this could be a long shot but it ought to be possible at least in theory, most people aren’t all that happy, they’re not massively miserable but we’re not talking walking on air here, they could do better. Then there are the other lot, those annoying people who look & act as if they’re cheerful all the time, every day, even in their sleep, the sort of people other people daren’t strangle because they know that they’d still smile all the way through. We don’t need to go this far which is a good thing because it would probably require drugs of some kind, what we need here is a tweak. This tweak is sort of life dependent & really needs you to be not all that unhappy to start with, it’s probably going to be less effective if you’ve just suffered a bereavement or had your legs amputated by mistake on the day your new shoes arrived. If however you’re faced with nothing more daunting than the humdrum struggle to get through your day without any major upheavals it could be of some use, we’ve all heard the old equation that if you end your day 5p in front then you’re happy whilst if you end your day -5p you’re unhappy, this is clearly bunk as no-one cares about 5p so we need a new way of seeing things.

First of all we have to accept that as a species we see the world the wrong way around, this is in many cases why people aren’t all that satisfied with their lives, there’s always something that we want that we’re probably never going to get & that even if we got it there’d only be something else we’d want. What we need to do is to start on our expectations, they’re way too high for most of us, we all get out of bed hoping like hell that today’s our day but more often than not it isn’t, it’s just a day, the usual way to alter this view is to consider other people who are having a worse time than ourselves. This way of doing things does carry some risks, firstly it’s fairly depressing & secondly there’s always the chance that you’re at the bottom of the list which wouldn’t do much good when it comes to cheering yourself up. Admittedly just watching the news produces many examples but these are dramatic & unfortunate examples & don’t go far in dealing with the sometimes mind-numbing grind of a daily life, mostly we’re just bored with ourselves & need to break out of our mind-set. The best way to do this is to be utterly focused on our ambitions & go for broke in achieving their achievement, this can be very tiring though so the alternative is to properly consider just what we can actually have. I don’t mean all that stuff about examining our lives & appreciating what we’ve got, it’s well meaning but some people don’t have much & others wouldn’t appreciate it if they had twice as much, this isn’t about what we’ve got but about what we can get.

The timescale is important too, you can’t live out your life relying on a future will, if you can fool yourself into the belief that your life is a lot better than it looks though then you’ll immediately feel better & what’s more will probably actually improve your life & the lives of all those around you simply by being more relaxed. We all imagine the future as somewhere where everything is better, where it’s all been worked out, the very first thing we need to do is to stop doing this, we need to concentrate on now but sensibly, plan by all means but not at the expense of today, this is our life as well. If you can’t have as flash a car as the neighbours then assume that their running costs are crippling & that their car is losing money daily, this works best if you don’t own a car but if you do then it should preferably be one that costs about the same as a 360, not worth as much, justs costs as much. When the spectre of not enough money comes up deal only with the important stuff & pat yourself on the back with every pound left unspent, if you’re single & hate it appreciate the selfishness that harms no-one, if you’re not single but wish it accept the selfishness & realise that your partner may feel the same. This is too serious though to feature in a meaningful way a pretence for joy, you can only lower your expectations so far & other people are seldom so neat as to agree with us all the time, we can though buff up the good bits of our day & tone down the trash. In one fell swoop if done hard enough we can make our existence a little more palatable & once we’re adept at the trick we may wonder whether or not fake happiness is or can become real happiness, we tend to project an image on to the world around us, fake a smile well & the world may just fake smile back at you, if nothing else it can hardly hurt.

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