Life’s good. Why do we feel bad?

Life’s good. Why do we feel bad?

We’ve tried shopping and New Age cures, making money and spending it. What’s missing from our lives?

 Did you notice an outbreak of joviality and generosity last week? People beaming at you as they let you go ahead in the bus queue, grinning as they shared your morning traffic jam, smirking through the quarterly budget planning meeting?

No? The organisers of National Smile Week will be down in the mouth. All their efforts to perk us up for at least seven days have run, then, into the sand of our collective scepticism. Four out of 10 of us think life has become worse in the past five years. 1________ Mix in some road/air/office/phone rage, a rise in reported incivility and a good dose of political apathy and the misery looks even starker. We live in an Eeyore England. We’re a wretched lot.

All this when average house prices have just blasted through the £100,000 mark, when life expectancy continues to lengthen, mortality rates are dropping and more than a third of young people enjoy what was once the elite privilege of higher education. We are healthy, wealthy and wise. Wages are up, unemployment is down. 2________ Yet we’ve never felt so bad.

If we seem like a nation of ingrates it may be because all the goodies that are supposed to make us happy don’t do it for us any more - even if we have yet to wake up to the fact. So, your house is worth half a million. All you do then is worry about insurance and inheritance tax. Karl Marx, who for all his faults knew a bit about capitalism, captured the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses dynamic of market economies perfectly: ‘A house may be large or small; as long as the neighbouring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all the social requirements of a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace and the little house shrinks to a hut.’ With mass media, the palace doesn’t have to be next door - it can be beamed into our living rooms. And the competition doesn’t stop with the three-bed semi; it applies to our car, our children’s clothes, even our bodies.

3________  Poor people, understandably, see their life satisfaction rise with income but for most of the population in a country as affluent as ours, any jump-start to wellbeing from a pay rise quickly wears off. ‘I was window-shopping in the South of France recently and I saw a diamond-studded woolly hat, and I quite fancied it’ Oswald says. ‘When we get to that stage we should realise that more money isn’t getting us much more in terms of happiness.’ Harrods is currently carrying a pair of shoes priced at a cool million - imagine if somebody stepped on your foot. 4________  Rates of consumption continue to rise - trapping us on what psychologists have dubbed a ‘hedonic treadmill’, hoping the next cycle, the next purchase, will finally get us to the promised land.

But what about health? Surely the virtual elimination of most fatal diseases, rising life-expectancy and falling mortality should be cheering us up? Not a bit of it. All that happens, according to Marks, is that our expectations rise just as or even more quickly. ‘Objectively, our health is better on almost every count,’ he says. ‘But this doesn’t translate into people feeling any healthier. People are more aware of their health, so they get more anxious about it. 5________’ Health-conscious means health-anxious. Medicine has become a victim of its own success: having massively reduced the chances of death in childbirth, for example, people are now shocked if a life is lost - and reach for a lawyer. Obstetrics and gynaecology have arguably done more than any other branch of medicine to improve life chances. Death was unavoidable - now it is unacceptable. 6________

With the accepted routes to happiness - marriage, mortgage, money - either blocked or leading nowhere, people are looking for an alternative. However, we are unlikely to find a magic bullet for happiness - after all, some of the world’s greatest minds have been pondering these questions for millennia. The answer to the question of happiness may be more prosaic: once countries and households are free of material need (if not of material ‘want’), the biggest contributor to life satisfaction seems to be a healthy set of personal relationships.

7________  The relative happiness of late teenagers and those passing middle age may relate to their spending more time on friendships. The thirty somethings, fighting on the two fronts of work and children, are the most dejected. Those between full-time education and retirement may be spending more time on the activities they think will make them happy - earning and spending - than on those that actually will: spending time with friends and family.

This friend-shaped gap explains the American paradox - why the residents of the richest nation in the world are so glum - according to Professor Robert E. Lane at Yale University. ‘There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbours, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solid family life,’ he says.

The secret of happiness? Not money. So leave the lawn, forget your investments and call in sick tomorrow. Do yourself a favour. 8________

I Look at the article. Eight sentences have been removed. Read the article and choose from the sentence (A-J) the one which fits each gap (1-8). There are two sentences which you do not need to use.

A.   And they also expect the system - the NHS - to take responsibility for it.

B.   We seek financial compensation if things go wrong.

C.   In material terms, we’ve never had it so good.

D.   Twelve million of us are on anti-depressants; only a minority of us think ‘people can be trusted most of the time’.

E.    Money doesn’t make most of us happy any more.

F.    Phone a friend.

G.   We want more out of life, but the number of hours in the day remains fixed.

H.   But you have to set against them the data suggesting television-watching is on the rise: there are as many people sinking into apathy and passivity as there are searching out new solutions.

I.      People who spend a long time commuting are statistically less satisfied than others: so Stephen Byers can now also take the blame for our foul mood.

J.     Not that we’ve stopped trying to buy a better life.

II Match the words from two columns to make collocations used in the text. Use four collocations in your sentences.

1.	run	A.	lot
2.	market	B.	compensation
3.	wretched	C.	off
4.	in terms	D.	someone up
5.	wear	E.	requirements
6.	call	F.	elimination
7.	keep up	G.	in the mouth
8.	satisfy	H.	rise
9.	be down	I.	expectancy
10.	road	J.	rate
11.	affluent	K.	up to the fact
12.	virtual	L.	in sick
13.	mortality	M.	every count
14.	pay	N.	responsibility for
15.	life	O.	with the Joneses
16.	inheritance	P.	of
17.	death	Q.	relationship
18.	seek financial	R.	economy
19.	on almost	S.	satisfaction
20.	wake	T.	country
21.	personal	U.	media
22.	take	V.	money
23.	fatal	W.	in childbirth
24.	mass	X.	someone a favour
25.	life	Y.	into the sand
26.	life	Z.	rage
27.	perk	AA.	expectancy
28.	make	BB.	tax
29.	do	CC.	disease

III Read the text above. Find words and expressions that match the definitions. Use three words or words combinations in your sentences.

1.    anger or violence between drivers, often caused by difficult driving conditions

2.    unhappy, disappointed, or without hope

3.    rudeness

4.    extremely or very much

5.    to smile in an affected or smug manner

6.    without interest, imagination, and excitement

7.    to make (someone) more lively or cheerful

8.    to smile with joy

9.    a person who is not grateful

10.almost a particular thing or quality

11.to be sad

12.the act, process, or an instance of removing or taking away

13.to smile showing the teeth especially in amusement or laughter

14.having a lot of money or owning a lot of things

IV Read the text above. Match the words and expressions that and the definitions.  Use four expressions in your sentences.

outbreak;   ponder;   Eeyore;   misery;   blast;   goody;   treadmill;   consumption; joviality;   mortgage ; purchase

1.    an agreement that allows you to borrow money from a bank in order to buy a house

2.    to think carefully about something, especially for a noticeable length of time

3.    a time when something suddenly begins, especially a disease or something else dangerous or unpleasant

4.    something that you buy

5.    to break through with a very strong force

6.    any type of repeated work that is boring and makes you feel tired and seems to have no positive effect and no end

7.    great unhappiness

8.    the quality in a person of being friendly and in a good mood, or of a situation being enjoyable, friendly and pleasant

9.    an object that people want or enjoy

10.the amount used or eaten

11.an excessively negative or pessimistic person

V Follow the link below. Focus on the words andexpressions (study definitions), match the terms to their definitions, solve the crossword puzzle, complete the quiz, chase down the correct answer to earn points, unscramble words and phrases (correct order of letters), type in words to fill in the blanks, test your knowledge of  vocabulary.

https://www.studystack.com/flashcard-3085883

VI OVER TO YOU. Find information about one of the global happiness surveys or happiness initiatives (e.g. National Smile Week). Write a paragraph about the survey or initiative you researched.