THE facts answer

When hope becomes
a formula to apply
Through careful calculation, a psychologist found the factors to measure happiness. But the falsity of this claim was revealed to me many years ago...

by John waters

Dr. Cliff Arnall, a Welsh psychologist, has devised a mathematical formula to demonstrate that June 18th is the happiest day of the year.
In a scientific study, he has quantified the extent to which “feel good factors”–like enjoying outdoor summer evenings, admiring nature in bloom, anticipating upcoming holidays, and remembering childhood summers–together create a sense of well-being that peaks just before the longest day of the year.
At the other end of the spectrum, having considered the weather, levels of personal debt, days passed since Christmas, and failed New Year’s resolutions, Dr. Arnall has declared January 18th the year’s “gloomiest” day. But I believe his theory–designed, of course, for the Northern Hemisphere–has more to do with expectation (or its absence) than with happiness as such.
What his formula charts is really a kind of trajectory of “enjoyment and endurance” of human life lived on a non-absolute plane, a life predictated by some recorded sense–based on past experience–of what existence is likely to deliver in the immediate period. He has tracked the tendency of human beings to attach happiness to a projection, dipping desires into the syrup of experience and thrilling in the prospect of repetition.
In this schema, the maximum “hope” is bound up with summer, with the idealization of daylight and with the sparking that happens between the human heart and the world in its ideal state.  
By this measurement, June 18th marks, approximately, the height of expectations, whereas on January 18th, with Christmas behind and spring a vague prospect, there is nothing but February to look forward to. Personally, when I encountered his theory, I was transported back to my drinking days, which I now recognize as a concentrated effort to enhance and regulate the quality of hope offered by the world.
High summer would have found me at the peak of “the search,” delving into glasses and bottles in pursuit of the “meaning” of my existence.  I stopped drinking alcohol on July 29, 1990, a date to which I have since attached an intense significance.
Those dying moments of July, I nowadays understand, are when the “hopes” bound up with summer finally delete their potential, when expectations that began around Easter finally exhaust themselves. 
Alcohol was for me a way of cushioning myself against all this, and I now recognize in Dr. Arnall’s formula a kind of logarithm table of the hopelessness that caused me to search relentlessly in a false direction.
But his formula still offers a useful way of becoming aware of time as it passes me by, something to allow to percolate in the awareness receptacle, perhaps as a casual invitation to myself to reflect a little further on what really sustains me, beneath the ebb and flow of superficial hoping.
For, as the years pass, it is inevitable that the hopes attaching themselves to immediate prospects will gradually lose their power. And then the only place to go is deeper into myself.