Are you happy?

David Cameron wants to assess the nations happiness. It seems this largely depends on what you think should make you happy and whether we are meant to by 'happy' at all. Personally, I have opted for joy rather than happiness which is both unending and non-circumstantial.

Malcolm Muggeridge has some thoughts:

"Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful, with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo jumbo . . . the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable. This of course is what the cross [of Christ] signifies, and it is the cross more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ."

 (Homemade, July, 1990)