Get happy: Paul Dolan, the man making London smile

Professor Paul Dolan, author of Penguin’s hotly anticipated new feel-good tome, Happiness by Design, says: ‘I thought you might ask me about London because everyone’s so f***ing miserable.’ The book’s thesis is that a happy existence requires not only pleasure but purpose and that we should engineer our lives to allocate time and attention to matters that yield both. This sounds deceptively simple, only most of us spectacularly fail at it, Londoners not least. In the 2012 Office for National Statistics (ONS) National Well-being Survey, the questions for which Dolan helped devise, Londoners were found to be Britain’s most malcontent, festering wretchedly away in our angst-inducing capital.

Dolan, 46, is a man who walks it as he talks it: witty, engaging, forever erupting into raucous laughter. As his book advocates taking action, so he is not short on it himself. A stammerer, he eradicated his speech impediment by hard graft; a skinny chap, he morphed his physique through bodybuilding. As we talk, he looks poised to spring out of his chair. He uses the f-word almost as much as I do. Indeed, I tell him that ES will have to rename him ‘Professor F***’ from his more regular epithet ‘Professor Happy’.

None of which detracts from his imposing academic credentials. After an economics degree at Swansea, he headed north to undertake a PhD at York. A chance encounter with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, led to a spell at Princeton, and he is now a professor in behavioural science at the London School of Economics, with a penchant for public policy. He is a former member of the Cabinet Office’s ‘nudge unit’ and part of the ONS’s wellbeing team; he has also advised the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

Born in Hackney and brought up in Essex by working-class parents, Dolan enjoys a certain outsider-turned-establishment-member status. ‘When I’m talking policy with politicos, I sometimes feel it’s like that scene in The Blues Brothers where the bartender says: “We’ve got both kinds of music: country and western.” They’ve got both kinds of university: Oxford and Cambridge.’

As one might expect, his book does not follow the customary self-help path of perkily platitudinous lists and bumper-sticker philo-sophy. The first half gives academic evidence for his purpose-must-be-married-with-pleasure thesis; the second, refreshingly unpatronising food for thought. The strategies he recommends — seeing one’s friends more, privileging experience over buying, listening to music — are not radical, but his principle of redesigning one’s life to be made of such moments is.

‘Originally the book was filled with song quotes,’ he tells me. ‘Then the publishers said we’d have to pay for them. But The Smiths’ line “Why do I give valuable time/To people who don’t care if I live or die” is everything brought together. We need to design our environments for maximum happiness. My friend Mig makes me happy so I structure it so we talk at the same time once a week.’ A case of self-nudging? ‘Well, yeah, but I once caught myself telling a mate to “nudge himself happy” and that sounded a bit dodgy, so I tend to avoid that sort of phrasing.’

Has he ever been depressed? His joviality is tempered by a respectful seriousness: ‘No, I haven’t, no. I think I’m resilient. You know how you can have two friends going through the same experience and one goes to pieces, but the other is fine? I think I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I’ll feel all right long-term. Things matter, but not that much. What do they say: the best way of getting over someone is by getting under someone else?’

The book is reassuring on the matter of break-ups: they hurt, but, ultimately, we convince ourselves we’ve moved on to something and someone better. It is advice he is adept at giving to heartbroken students. Dolan is as logical about his own emotional life, deciding to become a parent to Poppy, six, and Stanley, five, by weighing up that diminished pleasure would be compensated for by increased purpose; something he is having to remind himself as he teaches them their times tables. He has been with his wife Les for 12 years.

The only thing that ever approached denting his self-professed sentimental hedonism was living in London, which he did for two years. ‘I hated it. Only in London have I ever cared about money. It was almost like a pollution.’ He now resides in Brighton, coastal living having been proven to be cheer-inspiring.

Based on what the book teaches us about happiness, Londoners are basically screwed: caring too much about money, which never brings the satisfaction people imagine; spending rather than doing; living further away from friends; feeling less in control of their time; and doing fewer new things and spending less time in the fresh air. So what can those of us not fortunate enough to escape do about this?