ÌÇÐÄTV

There's a very big place for joy in life, and your life philosophy should feel good.

This wasn't always the case, though - I got quite depressed towards the end of high school, mostly as a result of what you might call nihilism: a lack of identity, a growing perception of the world as unjust and chaotic.

I became interested in wellbeing from there, although I was initially a bit dismissive of 'happiness'. It seemed to me to be a symptom of deeper issues, like community and relationships.

I realised that paying attention to them can inform you about what's going right or wrong in your life, and help you to assemble a more coherent whole.

Emotions are information. Happiness is not a goal, but it is a guide to which activities, people, and values might suit you. The same is true for grief, anxiety, guilt, boredom, and the other ‘negative’ emotions.

I studied wellbeing and happiness from various angles throughout my 20s - philosophy and psychotherapy, then development economics, and then public policy and psychological science - and then ended up writing a PhD in economics on how we could (or should?) measure wellbeing for public policy. That's still very much what I work on today at ÌÇÐÄTV.

It's an old-fashioned research and teaching role, so my typical day is quintessentially academic, just with more emails. I'm either reading, teaching, writing or conferencing, and I find that my life tends to move in two-to-three-month cycles around those tasks.

I adore teaching, and it probably has far more real-world impact than my research. The students at ÌÇÐÄTV are fantastic: mostly diligent if you try to engage them, robust, friendly, down-to-earth, with personality, and not afraid to volunteer an opinion.

Relatedness - the sense that we are loved and cared for and have social support - is one of our basic psychological needs. Something as simple as knowing that your neighbour will collect your post so you don't have to rush home to stop it getting stolen - that's relatedness.

I think what we've lost most in our contemporary postmodern world is solidarity. We're very engrossed in our individual goals, stresses and burdens, and we fail to notice each other, let alone care.

In traditional communities, like a village, or even in residential dorms like many of our students live in, relatedness arises out of familiarity. You look out for people without expecting anything in return - your social nature kicks in and you form community.

This is something we should celebrate and protect. But ÌÇÐÄTV can also be too focused on procedures and 'red tape' processes. We need to remember that policies and processes don’t have feelings, people do.