Hector and the Search for Happiness (2 page)

H
ECTOR’S practice was in a city full of wide avenues lined with attractive old buildings. This city differed from most of the world’s big cities: the inhabitants had plenty to eat; if they were ill they could receive free medical treatment; children went to school, and most people had a job. They could also go to lots of different showings at the cinema that weren’t too expensive; there were museums, swimming pools and even special places to ride bicycles without being run over. People could also watch lots of different TV channels, read all sorts of newspapers, and journalists were free to write almost whatever they wanted. People had plenty of time off, even though this could be a problem for those who didn’t have enough money to go away on holiday.

Because, although everything worked better than in most of the world’s big cities, there were still some people who had only just enough money to live on, and some children who couldn’t stand school and behaved very badly, or didn’t even have parents to look after them any more. There were also grown-ups who were out of work and who were so unhappy that they tried to make themselves feel better by drinking anything and everything or by taking very bad pills. But those people didn’t live in the type of neighbourhood where Hector worked. Hector knew they existed because he had treated a lot of them when he worked at the hospital. And since then, he’d continued going to the hospital every Wednesday instead of going to his practice. And that’s where he saw people like Roger, for example, whom he asked, ‘Have you been taking your medication, Roger?’

‘Yes, yes, the Lord is my shepherd, He leadeth me.’

‘I’m sure he does, but have you been taking your medication?’

‘Yes, yes, the Lord is my shepherd, He leadeth me.’

You see, Roger believed that the Good Lord talked to him constantly, what they call hearing voices, and he would reply out loud. What’s wrong with that? you may ask. The problem was that when Roger didn’t take his medication, he would talk to himself in the street - sometimes in a very loud voice if he’d had a drink - and unkind people would laugh at him. As he was quite a big fellow this occasionally ended in trouble, and Roger would find himself back in the psychiatric hospital for a long time.

Roger had a lot of other problems: he’d never had a mother and father to look after him, he hadn’t done well at school, and since he’d begun talking to the Good Lord nobody wanted to employ him. And so Hector, together with a lady from social services, had filled in loads of forms so that Roger could stay in his tiny studio flat in a neighbourhood you wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to live in.

At Hector’s practice it was very different from the hospital: the people who came to see him there had done quite well at school, had been brought up by a mother and a father, and had a job. Or if they lost their job they quite easily found another. They generally dressed nicely and knew how to tell their story without making grammatical errors and the women were often quite pretty (which was sometimes a problem for Hector).

Some of them had real disorders or had suffered real misfortune, and in this case Hector generally succeeded in treating them using psychotherapy and medication. But a lot of them had no real disorders - or at least none that Hector had learnt to treat when he was a student - and hadn’t suffered any real misfortune either - like having unkind parents or losing somebody really close to them. And yet, these people weren’t happy.

Take Adeline, for example, quite an attractive young woman whom Hector saw quite often.

‘How are you?’ Hector would ask.

‘Are you hoping that one day I’ll say: “Very well”?’

‘Why do you think I’d hope that?’

‘You must be getting rather fed up with my problems.’

She wasn’t far wrong, even though Hector was actually quite fond of Adeline. She was successful in her work which was to sell things - that’s to say, she knew how to sell things for a lot more than they were worth, and consequently her bosses were delighted and often gave her large bonuses.

And yet she never stopped complaining, especially about men. As she was really rather charming, she always had a man in her life, but it never worked out: either they were nice but she didn’t find them very exciting; or they were exciting but she didn’t find them particularly nice, or they were neither nice nor exciting and she wondered why she was with them at all. She had found a way of making the exciting men nicer and that was by leaving them. But then, of course, they weren’t exciting any more either. In addition, all these men were successful, because if a man wasn’t successful he didn’t stand a chance with Adeline.

Just by asking Adeline questions, Hector tried to make her understand that the height of happiness did not necessarily come from having the most excitement with a very successful man who is also very nice (especially as you can imagine how easy it is to find a very successful man who is also very nice!) But it was difficult, Adeline had very high standards.

Hector had quite a few patients like Adeline.

He also saw men who thought like Adeline: they wanted the most exciting woman who was also successful and nice. And at work it was the same: they wanted a very important job, but one that would allow them the freedom to ‘fulfil themselves’ — as some of them put it. Even when they were successful in their jobs they still wondered whether they wouldn’t have been much happier doing something else.

Basically, all of these well-dressed people said that they didn’t like their lives, they questioned their choice of profession, they wondered whether they were married or nearly married to the right person, they had the impression that they were missing out on something important in life, that time was passing and they couldn’t be everything that they wanted to be.

They weren’t happy, and it was no joke because some of them had thoughts of suicide, and Hector had to pay special attention to them.

He began wondering whether he didn’t attract that particular type of person. Perhaps there was something about his way of talking which they especially liked? Or about the way he twirled his moustache as he looked at them, or even about his Hindu statuettes? Which was why they passed on his address, and more and more of them turned up at his practice. He casually asked his more experienced colleagues if they only treated people with real disorders. Hector’s colleagues looked at him as if he’d asked rather a silly question. Of course they didn’t only treat people with real disorders! They also saw a lot of people who were dissatisfied with their lives and who felt unhappy. And from what they told him, Hector understood that they didn’t have much more success than him.

What was even stranger was that in those neighbourhoods where most people were much more fortunate than people living elsewhere, there were more psychiatrists than in all the other neighbourhoods put together, and every month new ones arrived! In fact, if you looked at a world map of psychiatrists (they’re very hard to find so don’t even try), you’d see that in countries like the one where Hector lived, there were far more psychiatrists than in the rest of the world, where there were nevertheless far more people.

That was all very interesting, but it was of no use to Hector. He felt that he wasn’t helping these unhappy people. Even though they liked coming back to see him, he was finding it more and more of a strain. He had noticed that he was far more tired after seeing people who were dissatisfied with their lives than after seeing patients like Roger. And since he was seeing more and more people who were unhappy for no apparent reason, he was becoming more and more tired, and even a little unhappy himself. He began to wonder whether he was in the right profession, whether he was happy with his life, whether he wasn’t missing out on something. And then he felt very afraid because he wondered whether these unhappy people were contagious. He even thought about taking pills himself (he knew some of his colleagues took them), but on reflection he decided that it wasn’t a good solution.

One day Madame Irina said to him, ‘Doctor, I can see that you’re very tired.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry if it shows.’

‘You should take a holiday, it would do you good.’

Hector thought that this was a good idea: why didn’t he go on holiday?

But being a conscientious young man, he would plan his holiday so that it would help him to become a better psychiatrist. He would take what they call a busman’s holiday.

And so he decided to take a trip around the world, and everywhere he went he would try to understand what made people happy or unhappy. That way, he told himself, if there was a secret of happiness, he’d be sure to find it.

H
ECTOR announced to his patients that he was going away on holiday.

When they heard the news, some of them, often those with the most serious disorders, said to him, ‘You’re absolutely right, Doctor, with the job you do you need a rest!’ But others seemed slightly put out that Hector was going on holiday. They said to him, ‘So, I won’t be able to see you for several weeks?’ They were generally the unhappy people whom Hector couldn’t make happy and who were wearing him out.

Hector had a good friend, Clara, and he also had to tell her that he was going away on holiday. He asked her whether she would like to go with him, not just to be polite, but because he liked Clara a lot and they both felt they didn’t spend enough time together.

Hector and Clara loved each other, but they found it difficult to make plans together. For example, sometimes it was Clara who wanted to get married and have a baby and sometimes it was Hector, but they almost never wanted it at the same time.

Clara worked very hard for a big company — a pharmaceutical company that produced the pills psychiatrists prescribe. In fact, that’s how she’d met Hector, at a conference organised to present the latest products to psychiatrists, and in particular the wonderful new pill her company had just invented.

Clara was paid a lot of money to come up with names for pills that would appeal to psychiatrists and their patients all over the world. And also to make them believe that the pills her company made were better than those made by other companies.

Although she was still very young she was already successful and the proof of this was that when Hector rang her at the office, he was almost never able to speak to her because she was always in a meeting. And when she and Hector went away for the weekend, she would take work to finish on her laptop while he went out for walks on his own or fell asleep beside her on the bed.

When Hector suggested to Clara that she go with him, she said that she couldn’t just leave like that out of the blue, because she had to go to meetings to decide on the name for the new pill her company was making (which would be better than all the other pills that had ever been made since the beginning of time).

Hector didn’t say anything; he understood. But he was still slightly put out. He wondered whether going away together wasn’t actually more important than meetings to find a name for a new pill. But since his profession was to understand other people’s points of view, he simply said to Clara: ‘That’s all right, I understand.’

Later, while they were having dinner at a restaurant, Clara told Hector how complicated life was at her office. She had two bosses who both liked her, but who didn’t like each other. This made it very difficult for Clara, because when she worked for one boss there was always a risk she might upset the other boss, and vice versa when she worked for the first boss, if you follow. Hector didn’t really see why she had two bosses at the same time, but Clara explained that it was because of something called ‘matrix management’. Hector thought that this sounded like an expression invented by psychiatrists, and so he wasn’t surprised that it created complicated situations and drove people a bit crazy.

He still hadn’t told Clara the real reason for his holiday, because since the beginning of their dinner it had mostly been Clara talking about her problems at work.

But as he was growing a little tired of this, he decided to begin his investigation into what made people happy or unhappy straight away. When Clara stopped talking in order to finish her meal, Hector looked at her and said, ‘Are you happy?’

Clara put down her fork and looked at Hector. She seemed upset. She said, ‘Do you want to leave me?’

And Hector saw that her eyes were shining — like when people are about to cry. He put his hand on hers and said: no, of course not (although actually there had been times when he had thought about it), he had only asked her that because he was beginning his investigation.

Clara seemed reassured, though not completely, and Hector explained why he wanted to understand better what made people a little happy or unhappy. But now there was another thing he wanted to understand, and that was why when he’d asked Clara whether she was happy she’d thought that Hector wanted to leave her.

She told him that she’d taken it as a criticism. As if Hector had said: ‘You’ll never be happy’ and that therefore he wouldn’t want to stay with her, because, obviously, nobody wants to live with a person who’ll never be happy. Hector assured her that this was not at all what he’d meant. In order to put Clara’s mind completely at rest, he joked around and made her laugh, and this time they both felt in love at the same time until the end of the meal and even afterwards when they went home to bed.

Later, as he was falling asleep beside her, he told himself that his investigation had got off to a good start, that he’d already discovered two things.

One of them he already knew, but it was good to be reminded of it: women are very complicated, even if you are a psychiatrist.

The other would be very useful to him during his investigation: you must be careful when you ask people whether they’re happy; it’s a question that can upset them a great deal.