The Metropolis

Study shows that shared experiences makes us happy, so what is your problem?

Michael Pollitt | Saturday 15 May, 2010 15:41

Well that was fun, wasn’t it? The last 10 years I mean. As decades go it was pretty… well, decadent. It’s almost as if we’ve spent the time getting pissed on someone else’s tab at an exclusive West End club—somewhere full of smart shoes, unironic blazers and slightly wrinkling cougars decked in pearls. But now the faces have turned to us expectantly, and Clegg and Cameron are muttering darkly about it being our round. Which I suppose it is. To make things worse, some twat has only gone and ordered some 2012 Olympics at £9bn a bottle, although the occasion clearly calls for a few mineral waters and a bag of Nobby’s Nuts.

All in all, we’re pretty fucked, and not in a fun biblical way. We’re not going down in an all-singing, all-sodomizing blaze of fire and brimstone here. Instead it looks like years of slow, austere decline. Tighten your vintage belt. Prepare for death by a thousand cuts.

So runs the pessimistic mood. But isn’t optimism just so much cooler? And in the spirit of making the best of a bad job, check out this new research I’ve cherry picked specifically to make you feel better. Because science has proved categorically that those stupid expensive Olympics are in fact going to save us all!
I may be overstating slightly. But two City University economists have studied the effect that hosting a big sporting event has on a country’s mood. For up to a year after hosting the event, people in that country say they are happier. Measuring joy is a notoriously tricky thing, but the researchers reckon each of us can expect to have nearly enough extra happy in our systems to offset the misery caused by a divorce. So if your marriage is a loveless husk, it’s worth sticking in there until 2012 before you call it quits. Olympic fever will lift you right out of that spiral of despair.

The question, of course, is why? Why should the stadium and tower currently rising in the East End like the world’s most expensive sunrise make any of us feel better about ourselves? The answer must be identity. Think of the people you know. Who are the happy ones? I’ll bet it’s the people with the strongest identities, the people who know themselves, and where they want to go. And the unhappiest? I can tell you from experience that it’s probably those who feel adrift, uncertain, flotsaming between jobs and partners and dreams in the vast and lonely wilderness of their pathetically empty lives.

What’s true for individuals is true for cities too. London has a thousand identities, a thousand selves. The Olympics are big enough to draw these selves together. We’ll be just like the aliens’ weapon in Independence Day, which gather the ship’s energy from all directions into a single, concentrated beam strong enough to blast the White House to smithereens. We will be that beam, London, and it will make us happy. As long as we ban Randy Quaid from the closing ceremony, we’ll be fine.

There’s a bigger lesson in this too. We can’t replicate this London-wide bliss all the time because without the focus of the Games we are just too disparate, too diverse. But on a smaller scale we absolutely can do something to make stronger, happier selves. If things get much worse, we might not be able to afford to buy our happiness any more. It’s a terrifying thought. But if we throw ourselves into creating strong identities for our communities and ourselves, we might not have to.

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