TY - JOUR T1 - The homeostatics of happiness JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 885 LP - 885 VL - 54 IS - 508 AU - Iain Bamforth Y1 - 2004/11/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/54/508/885.abstract N2 - Ziyad Marar The happiness paradox Reaktion Books 2003. PB, 208pp, £12.95, 1 86189 182 2 Carl Elliott Better than well: American medicine meets the American dream W W Norton & Company Ltd 2003. PB, 357pp, $14.95, 0 39332 565 2The Western world has never been more prosperous than it is now, even if much of its wealth seems the outcome of smoke and mirrors. What to former eras were utopian fantasies (greater productivity, reduced infant mortality, higher life expectancy) are now so taken for granted we hardly notice them. What we notice, in fact, are the shortcomings. These days, in the garden of earthly delights, market forces have even managed to turn hedonism into a kind of militancy. Yet journalists, sociologists, and historians — not to speak of the occasional professional ethicist — are equally of one voice: we are not happy. It is one of the distressing futilities at the heart of modern life, one related to that other contemporary concern: the less real adversity we experience in our lives the more we feel under threat.But what is happiness anyway? Why do we think we can call upon it for personal usage, when its etymology (the Oxford English Dictionary identifies it as an earlier synonym for fortuity) suggests happiness comes unbidden, like a state of grace? Why are we never further from happiness than when we think we are actually enjoying it? And why, in contempt of the Benthamite ‘felicific calculus’ which, refined into the … ER -