True path to happiness can be found working hard at the office

I know I am happiest when working and therefore am very glad to find a book that confirms my view

THERE ARE few things that make me feel grimmer than reading about happiness. In the past few years, an entire library of dismal titles on the subject has been published including, in escalating order of duffness, Happier, The How of Happiness, Happiness Now!, Delivering Happiness, Authentic Happiness, The Happiness Makeoverand Getting to Happy.

I used to think that getting to happy was not possible from reading a book. At least, not if the subject of the book was happiness. I did get to happy recently when re-reading the novel One Fat Englishmanby Kingsley Amis, but that was about lechery, gluttony and sloth – so it didn't really count.

However, last week I was sent a book about happiness that has left me feeling extraordinarily cheery. It is called Rush: Why You Need and Love the Rat Racewritten by a blue-eyed Californian called Todd G. Buchholz, who was an economic adviser at the White House.

Rushis different from the other happiness books that tell us to slow down, take stock, connect with a past moment when we were happy, "invest" in relationships, meditate, smile, do yoga, forgive and take up oil painting, a musical instrument or God. These books make me feel wretched in two ways – first because wondering whether I'm happy always ends in tears and second because such spiritual bossiness fills me with pointless doubts about my own wonderful life, which involves dashing about earning money, shouting at my family, shopping and going to bed with Kingsley Amis.

It is, therefore, a terrific relief to turn to Rushand find that the true path to happiness involves doing what most of us do all the time, whether we like it or not – work. Stress, he says, makes us happy. Competition is good; without it we wouldn't just be unhappy, we would have died out long ago. It doesn't make us selfish, it makes us co-operate.

Retirement is bad as it makes you stupid. Working weekends is fine as it shows that you are needed – which is all most of us want. And earning lots of money is also all right because it is a sure sign that someone appreciates you. Best of all, from my point of view (given that my controlling tendencies are derided at least once a day at home) it is good to be a control freak. With control comes happiness.

I found myself nodding so hard as I read all this, full of awe at the bravery of extolling these virtues of capitalism, that I almost cricked my neck.

But then I thought it was all very well for Mr Buchholz to have this view as the rat race has served him rather well. In the inside back flap, he describes himself as an “award-winning teacher at Harvard”, a hedge fund managing director and a producer of a Broadway show, also described as award-winning. It is easier to see the joy of competition if you are the one getting the prizes.

However, he isn’t talking just about himself and deploys anthropology, economics and neuroscience in support of his thesis. Our frontal cortexes love it when we move forward. We get a surge of dopamine and serotonin when we take on a new task; we are bathed in warmer oxytocin as we chat to colleagues; when we succeed, we get a shot of beta-endorphins, which are as good as cocaine.

But I don’t need to invoke my frontal lobe to know that he is right about me. I know I am at my happiest when I’m working hard and well.

This is because I find losing myself much more rewarding than trying to find myself – and it’s much easier to get lost in work than in the washing up. Working hard makes you feel better about yourself and, after a prolonged period of hard slog, you feel sufficiently virtuous to enjoy a bout of self-indulgence with the gayest abandon.

Mr Buchholz is deliciously scornful of those who believe that sitting around camp fires holding hands and singing “Kumbaya” leads to anything apart from sweatiness and, possibly, sootiness. He regards the new happiness gurus as not just soft in the head in their sentimental nostalgia for a lost Eden but dangerous, too.

But now that he has shown me that I’m not a bad or shallow person to find happiness in making money, exerting control and competing, I’m more inclined to be condescendingly magnanimous about the happiness foibles in others. The “Fat Englishman” may get off on fornication and fried chicken, while others may prefer slowing down, smiling all day and doing the downward dog in yoga class.

The great thing about happiness is that there is no competition for it: the supply is perfectly elastic, so what floats anyone’s boat is fine so long as they desist from trying to rock mine. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011)