Core77

The Financial Times ran an article yesterday on happiness, arguing that if we all found it tomorrow, our economy would soon be in big trouble:

"Within weeks, the high-tech industry, which feeds on the creation of new and unfulfilled desires, would be in difficulties; the fashion world, which survives by persuading us that our perfectly good jeans are either too baggy or too tight, would start to flounder. The luxury goods industry would surely follow; new cars would be next. Before long, we'd be in a full-blown recession. Give it a decade and we'd be back in the Dark Ages."

"So we should be careful what we wish for," says the article's author Stehen Cave. "Perhaps there's something to say for dissatisfaction."

In Enough: Breaking Free From the World of More (Amazon), journalist John Naish concludes "that we are not designed to have happiness as our natural default state."

Or as Antonio Dini wrote in this review (in Italian): "Happiness, the nirvana of senses and aspirations, kills creativity and innovation that are born from needs and wants." In Naish's words: "Dissatisfaction is the driver of human endeavour".