I've been looking forward to death since birth

The first time I watched Papillon, I couldn't understand it at all. This, it turned out during prolonged discussion with my parents later, was because I hadn't appreciated that solitary confinement was supposed to be a punishment. I thought he was a favoured prisoner in receipt of special privileges. That's the misanthropic mindset for you, in a nutshell.

My parents, recognising there was little they could do now to make the necessary genetic changes to their pathologically antisocial child, advised me to look for information that would enable me to do a passable imitation of a normal member of society, and hope for the best.

Thus I have been poring over the latest research by the good doctors at our very own Warwick University and Dartmouth College in the US, who have discovered, after careful questioning of 2 million people and what I can only assume was the greatest mass deployment of clipboards in sociological history, that human happiness is U-shaped. It peaks at 20, then goes into a decline as we head towards middle age, with the average person collapsing face first into their 44th birthday cake in a dribbling heap of misery and despair before beginning the reascent to happiness and emerging at their most content at the ripe old age of 70.

There are those who would say that 2 million people can't be wrong. There are others of us, of course, who will point these people in the direction of the viewing figures for EastEnders and, wordlessly, empirically demonstrate the truth of the matter, which is that well over that number can be wrong, wholly wrong and repeatedly, many times a week and for many years at a time. And there are certainly plenty of people around who would take issue with the notion of happiness first topping out at 20, instead of this being the age at which you find yourself no sooner having sloughed off the worst of the damage done to you by teenage friends and overactive sebaceous glands than you are pitched into the world of work, rent and sexually transmitted diseases that actually matter. But a large number of people - including one of the survey leaders, Professor Andrew Oswald - have found the results heartening because they contradict most people's intuitive sense that happiness declines the older (ie, closer to death) you become.

Well, bully for them. The U-shaped model is a definite comedown from my own conceptualisation of happiness, which has always been that it runs in a straight slope upwards towards the grave.

I don't offer this in a preening, "Look at me, I'm so very cleverly different!" kind of way. I am, after all, basically admitting that not only I have been looking forward to death since birth, but living under the kind of gross misapprehension (by assuming that everyone else has been doing likewise) that can be born only of profound idiocy. Which would be, I think we can all agree, an odd boast.

In my defence, however, and after studying the three models I now realise are available to me, I do think mine offers certain advantages. First, it means that all the time your worst years are behind you. Second, if you have children, you will not gaze at their soft, unlined faces with jealousy in your heart, nor long to crush their youthful exuberance with tumbling fists in recompense for your own lost youth. And, third, you will always be looking forward to the next, best thing instead of the next best thing until they carry you out in a box. It's a twisted, insane kind of optimism, but I still think it beats 50 years of gloom sandwiched between a few fleeting years of glory. Onwards and upwards!

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