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The Science of a Smile
In the film City Slickers, after asking Billy Crystal if he knew what the secret of life was, Jack Palance raises his pointed finger and says, “This. Just one thing. That’s what you’ve got to figure out.” Happiness (the secret of life that Palance was referring to) is a subjective concept, as is sadness, too. And when one tries to describe it or conceptualise it, one tends to resort to synonyms like joy, contentment, pleasure, well-being, serenity, fulfilment; sentiments all close to happiness, but different from it. However, there is one characteristic that many people agree on; that happiness is a revelation. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, puts ages olds hypotheses to the test in his exploration of the sentiment, allowing himself to be guided by ancient wisdom. Roughly translated, this would seem to correspond to the raw ingredients to be found in the good sense recipe suggested by Monty Python’s Meaning of Life: “Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”
But, of course, put like this it all sounds way to simple…
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