They gave happiness a day. Not a month. Not a year. A day. Yesterday, to be precise. Whoever decided this was being more honest than they perhaps intended. Today is a different problem.

I have spent a considerable part of my adult life trying to attain happiness. I approached it the way most of us do.

First, through acquisition.

Better job. Better city. Better car. The list goes on. Phone. Bag. Shoe. And so on. Nothing explains it better than my shaving razor. My dad got me started with his single blade Wilkinson Sword. I have lived to see it progress steadily, and the one I have now has six blades. My dad would have laughed. I am not sure my face is better off for it.

Each upgrade arrived with the quiet promise that this was the one. Happiness showed up, signed the register, and left before breakfast. So I upgraded again. Happiness came back, stayed a little longer, left anyway. Buying my way to happiness has not helped.

I have tried the other route as well.

When I become a manager, I will be happy. Once the housewarming is done. When the home loan is repaid. When I get married. When the kid gets into a good college.

And so on, in perpetual deferral, each destination promising to be the one where happiness finally unpacks and stays. It doesn’t. It was always just passing through. I kept buying the ticket anyway, earning the loyalty points, and using them to fly back and do it all again.

Psychologists call this the arrival fallacy. It is not a flattering name.

The World Happiness Report

The World Happiness Report arrived, as it does every year on World Happiness Day, with the usual suspects at the top. Finland, for the eighth consecutive year. Denmark. Iceland.

The Scandinavians, doing whatever it is they do in the dark and the cold that the rest of us cannot manage in the sun. India came in at 118th out of 147 countries. We have moved up from 126th last year, which is progress, and I am sure someone has already denounced the report and submitted real data, or quoted the Rig Veda, or both.

This year the report looked at social media. The conclusions were not cheerful. The more we scroll, the worse we feel. Somewhere between the highlight reels and the carefully filtered holidays, we have decided that everyone else is living better. They are not. They are just better at cropping.

Here is what the science says

And it has been saying this for a while, quietly, in journals nobody reads. Happiness lives in real experience. In wonder. In curiosity. Relationships. In conversations that go longer than planned. In the wrestling match with a hard problem and the particular satisfaction when something finally gives. In the state where you are working on something and before you know it an hour has gone.

In a filter kaapi that arrives at exactly the right temperature. In conversations with strangers. In kindness. In generosity. In gratitude. In ordinary moments that ask nothing of you except to be present for them.

Not in the object. In the moment around the object, before it arrived and the wanting stopped. We know this, most of us, somewhere in the back of the mind where inconvenient truths are stored alongside gym membership intentions and unread books about living better.

Go back to being a child

This year I have been trying. Refresh. Slower. More deliberate. Renewing myself to what actually matters. It is harder than it sounds. But I am on it.

Phone less. Wonder more. Laugh at things that are not that funny. Talk to somebody, not at them. Ask a stranger how they are and wait for the actual answer. Be curious about things with no return on investment. Be generous without calculating the exchange rate.

A hundred studies. A dozen reports. Several thousand years of philosophy. All pointing to the same postcode. It is not complicated. It is just inconvenient. A soulful tune nobody can hear over the sale notifications.

As I write this, a friend texts asking if I know when the iPhone flip is coming. Does anyone have a kidney to spare?