Low expectations and the real secret to happiness

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Happiness is just an illusion concluded soul singer Jimmy Ruffin when – back in the summer of 1966 – he posed the question as to What Becomes of the Broken Hearted and took it all the way into the top ten of the UK and American charts.

And that harsh truth is just as well really, because it dovetails perfect with the Irish psyche – there is something fundamentally misfiring in us which makes it infinitely easier for us to deal with disappointment than joy.

Indeed Ruffin’s classic – you may be more familiar with the 1980 version with Colin Bluntstone – could have given us a new national anthem since this illusion of happiness is ultimately, as he puts it, just ‘filled with sadness and confusion’.

The simple truth is that we’re not comfortable with happiness – and perhaps not even with success.

After all, look at our history; what other nation would gather in droves on the streets of Dublin to hail their heroic football team after its elimination from the World Cup at the group stages?

Remember back to Italia 90 and the homecoming that left Big Jack mesmerised as to why the streets were full to hail a team that was eliminated at the quarter-final stages.

That all came flooding back recently given that this is the 25th anniversary of those halcyon days, and RTE put on a very late-night highlights package from that summer indelibly inked in the memory.

Jack Charlton’s speech – ‘we ate well, trained hard and drank little – but that will all change tonight’. The Aer Rianta banner high on top of Dublin Airport – “Ireland Your Magic” – composed by someone who saved a small fortune of apostrophes and ‘e’s.

The spat with Dunphy; Packie’s save from a Romanian whose name sounded like a brand of shampoo; Toto’s goal poaching to send us home after we’d scaled heights we never imagined but which for the big teams was really just the start of the business end of the competition.

We love pyrrhic victories – a good performance that allows us to depart with dignity intact at some point just before they start handing out the medals.

And that’s no disrespect to Jack’s Army because everything is relative to where you come from – and coming from nowhere to the quarter-finals is a triumph we will never forget.

It’s just that, as Jack himself put it, when he said he hoped Ireland would do it all again and enjoy another homecoming: “And maybe the next time we’ll have won something.”

But we don’t actually need silverware or trophies to see the good in moral victories – the potential for the future, the pluses that somehow mask the minuses; the things to cling to that allow us to hope.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.