The Geography of Bliss

have his mind clouded. If you believe that pleasure, or at
least the absence of pain, is man’s highest ideal, then
Freud’s decision made no sense. Yet happiness, as Tim
sees it, is more than simply an uninterrupted series of
pleasurable moments, and that’s a point he feels the
positive-psychology movement misses.
Tim also finds positive psychology’s emphasis on
optimism troubling. Optimism is sometimes a wonderful
thing, but not always. Tim gives me an example. Let’s say
you’re on a flight, and there is a problem, an engine has
caught fire. Would you want an optimistic pilot at the
controls Perhaps, but what you really want, Tim says, is a
wise pilot. Wisdom born from years of experience.
“Part of positive psychology is about being positive, but
sometimes laughter and clowns are not appropriate. Some
people don’t want to be happy, and that’s okay. They want
meaningful lives, and those are not always the same as
happy lives.”
I can’t argue with that. Tim, I realize, neatly combines
American optimism and British circumspection in one
package. I bet he’s a good therapist.
Slough lies a few miles west of Heathrow Airport, just
outside the M25 motorway, London’s equivalent of the
Washington Beltway. This places Slough squarely in noman’s-land,
neither part of London nor divorced from it
entirely. Not a happy space to occupy, as anyone in mid-