It's the age of the kidult. Play is a way of life. Which sounds fun. Though the bigger your fantasy life, the smaller your real life.

From Life Class, the Evening Standard column I share with others from The School of Life.

It’s often remarked that people work too hard. At four in the morning, city traders can be seen jogging through Shoreditch, exercising before hitting their desks. At lunchtime, sandwich bars are packed with office workers grabbing a bite, even as they read a magazine telling them that a proper break will do wonders for their happiness. In the early evening, commuter trains are full of folk checking their email on handheld devices that were supposed to increase their leisure, not bring the office back home. We’re all workaholics now.

And yet, I suspect the problem is not so much that we work too hard. Rather, it’s that we work hard without being quite sure what we’re working for.

Consider the story of Cleanthes, the ancient Greek. He arrived in Athens, from a place way out of town, after something of a midlife crisis. He’d been a boxer, though now fed up with that, he wanted to wrestle with life and the best ideas. The trouble was he had only four drachma in his pocket, roughly four days wages for a skilled worker. Unlike many of his aristocratic philosopher peers – the likes of Aristotle and Epicurus – he would have to fund his studies. So he took up gardening by night, in order to philosophize by day. He became known as ‘the water-carrier.’

Other citizens were seriously impressed with his application. After a few months of this arduous regime, they awarded him an honorarium of ten minas, roughly three months wages for a skilled worker. It was the ancient equivalent of a student grant. In return, he wrote them a poem. In it, he extolled his fellows not to be swept along by blind desires, for if you live like that, you risk destroying your principles, your relationships, your passions. Don’t work hard and miss what you want, he advised.

Cleanthes wasn’t offering the trite self-help tip, simply to work less. He thought it is good to work hard and, after all, it is only human to want more and to devote your life to the pursuit of it. But he’d opted for a simple trade, the gardening, in order to preserve his energies for his main love, the philosophy. It’s rather like the novelist and poet, Adam Foulds, who took menial jobs that paid in order to fund his writing, which at first didn’t.

So the trick is this. Don’t not work hard. But do keep a check on whether you are working for what you really desire.

Joseph Stiglitz's examination of GDP for President Sarkozy has provided the champions of the politics of happiness a first chance, since the gloomy days of the credit crunch, to again air their programme. Richard Layard did so in the name of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which I find doubly frustrating since the Enlightenment surely suggests exactly the opposite of what the good lord proposes - as I tried to argue in a piece for the Guardian. A taster:

'(Mill) reflects on what went wrong in his autobiography, and concludes with this thought: "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so." It's perhaps the single most important sentence on happiness written during the Enlightenment, though one the new scientists of happiness – who ask people little else – appear not to have read.'

(Image: Wing-Chi Poon - 18th century books on Enlightenment were not uncommonly illustrated with images of the sun clearing clouds.)

'I have been in love, but with people who have tended to be no good.'

I read this yesterday in a newspaper profile. And it set me thinking, because on one understanding of love, associated with Plato, love is drawn to the beautiful and good. So why someone should persistently fall in love with the 'no good' might seem to be something of a conundrum. However, Plato had other suggestions that might explain it.

First, he also believed that we love what we lack, in the case of relationships the lack being our 'lost' or 'other half,' as he put it. So, if you were a good person yourself, you might fall for bad people, a case of opposites attracting - the bad opposite being what you lack.

Plato also had an idea that people can revolt against the person that they love, as a kind of grudge against the feeling of dependence. So it may be that a good person falls in love, and then, by virtue of being good, provokes a reaction in their partner against that goodness, causing the partner to become bad.

There is also the simple possibility that pretty much all people are no good, and so the sensitive soul will prefer to devote their lives to something less flawed - like philosophy, which appears to have been the case with Plato himself: I don't think he was against relationships per se, but it is the case that he never married.

Another thought that emerges is the notion that love can be a kind of repetition. Plato was quite clear that love is promiscuous, in the sense that loving leads to more loving. Ideally, that generates an upward spiral of love, which eventually yields great insights into that which is good and true. But it is possible that it leads to an aimless repetition of old patterns of loving, loving one 'no good' person after another. Worse, it could lead to a downward spiral, a plunge into the destructiveness of love.

(Image: Brancusi, The Kiss, Philadelphia Museum of Art)

There's a particularly good section on beauty, love and friendship in Alexander Nehamas' new book, Only a Promise of Happiness.

What is the dynamic that draws us when we spot someone across a room and suddenly all else is background, he asks? In a word, beauty - the person drawing us body and soul, and in truth there is no neat distinction between body and soul, for all that their physical presence might strike us most powerfully at first. Interpreting a face is like interpreting music, thought Wittgenstein; it is at once a physical and spiritual concern.

Our response to this beauty is to want to make them our own, not in the consumerist sense, but in the sense that we want our life to be bound up with theirs: my desire to possess you is inseparable from my desire to be possessed by you.

Moreover, to fall in love is to be unsettled, not just because there is suddenly someone else who you must know, and be known by. It is unsettling because you no longer know the basis on which you wish to be in the world: to fall in love is to want to be changed. There is now more to me than I knew before, as well as more of you.

Friendship is a similar thing, if typically less intensely felt. 'To love my friends for themselves does not prevent me from loving them for my own sake as well... It does, however, require that I give them a part in determining what my sake actually is, what sort of person I shall turn out to be as a result of our friendship.'

Nehamas also contends that it is impossible to love that which you don't find beautiful; even the ugliest person becomes beautiful in the eyes of the person who has befriended them. Think of the way the elephant man, John Merrick, was recognised as intelligent and kind as his doctor Frederick Treves got to know him. Appearance alters when it finds an alteration in us.

Finally, Nehamas reflects that 'beauty points to the future, and we pursue it without knowing what it will yield.' When you tell someone you love them, you love, in part, that which you don't yet know, and that which you hope might be disclosed to you. 'Beauty inspires desires without letting me know what they are for.' Or as Stendhal put it, beauty is the promise, but only the promise, of happiness.

The New Economics Foundation have a fun online questionnaire to assess your 'happy planet index'. Questions range from the extent of your waste to the size of your waist.

From my point of view, which is suspicious of both the self-centred nature of so much of wellbeing talk and the way it attempts to measure feelings, too many of the wellbeing-type questions were based around the word 'I' and/or asked you about your feelings.

It seems to me that the best philosophers who have thought about the matter realise that being other-centred is key, and also that feelings are a poor and misleading way of thinking about wellbeing: meaning matters, and that's a question of things like commitment, ethics and belief.

It's what my book Wellbeing is all about. No questionnaire in it, I fear, but what I take to be the best insights of others.

It is one of the paradoxes of the contemporary working world that whilst people earn a living in enormously diverse ways, many individuals feel entirely trapped by the specialization they have, as if they couldn't possibly do anything else.

We were thinking about this last night on The School of Life Work Course, and had two people in who had changed career big time. Talking with them, some top tips emerged if you are thinking of shifting jobs, going freelance, or setting up your own business.

1. Talk to people: talk to everyone about what you want to do, and advice, leads and help will come.

2. Be honest: ask yourself what really motivates you - money, vocation, making something work - and go with it.

3. Show you are serious: even if by just signing up for a course - don't dream; do.

4. Feelings matter: if something doesn't feel right, it probably isn't right.

5. Nothing is lost: when you work for yourself, even that old O-level in Latin might come in useful somewhere along the line.

6. Seize your chances: you get lucky by making some luck.

7. Make inspiration: by committing to what feels right for you.

8. Leave old work on a high: try to do it to the best of your ability, and then know it's not you.

9. Keep fit: there is nothing like exercise for clearing the mind and relieving stress.

10. Take the knocks: they will come, and will feel painful, but what doesn't kill you, strengthens and tests your ideas.

Yesterday, I was asked to make a comment about why we like picnicking. Ever the professional, something came to mind, because luckily I'd just been reading some Marx, as you do.

Marx believed human beings are 'of nature'. We not only shape the environment but make ourselves through our labour on the land, in fields, even in gardens - that bourgeois mode of self-realization.

Alienation comes about because we are removed from nature: we no longer enjoy the fruits of our labour in a quite literal sense. And this is where the joys of the picnic come in. Picnicking involves taking our food to the fields, back to the fields, you might say. It symbolically reforms the link between our alienated selves and our natural-loving labouring selves. Therein lies it's profound pleasure, at least as Marx might have had it.

You’d think that politicians would have given up on the idea of making citizens happy, that they currently have enough on their plate. But no. Some push the happiness agenda still. Any why shouldn’t they, you might ask? After all, if one of the tough lessons of a recession is that money can’t deliver the good life, then maybe now is precisely the time to aim higher.

However, I think the logic is flawed. Politics is just aiming at the wrong thing when it aims at delivering happiness. It’s not that wellbeing, as I prefer to call it, isn’t a fine goal. It’s that politics is the wrong level at which to pursue it. There are a number of reasons for this.

The philosophical point is that happiness is a by-product of a life lived well, not something to aim for directly. This is what John Stuart Mill appreciated when he critiqued the utilitarian project of his godfather Jeremy Bentham. In other words, politics should aim at providing conditions so that citizens have the best chance at living well, which in terms of government means focusing on things like education, employment and the environment – in other words, the things that governments should be doing anyway. When attention shifts from these matters towards happiness direct, say by getting involved in actually boosting levels of contentment, the risk is that the matters which actually make for human wellbeing are lost sight of. Further, when politicians aim to deliver things like meaning, and moreover citizens turn to politicians to find it, we really have got things the wrong way round.

There are more contingent difficulties with a politics of happiness too. For example, political parties inevitably look for quick fixes, such is the election cycle; and the politics of happiness is inevitably embarked upon with at least one eye to its electoral benefits: the rhetoric of happiness is just too tempting not to exploit. But politicians going for quick fixes will thereby tend to paper over the cracks of deeper problems in society that might actually be deeper causes of human distress. The obvious candidate for that right now is the excesses of the boom/bust cycle: that they took their eye off that is the issue they should be analyzing. In fact, now I come to think of it, the politics of happiness boomed even as the economy boomed, which might suggest some link between the two.

Government projects aimed at happiness also run the risk of being subject to cost-benefit analysis, or worse a regime of targets. The trouble here is that beyond a few crude measures, wellbeing just isn’t amenable to that kind of assessment, and is distorted when it is subjected to it. There is a lot of talk of better measures for wellbeing, but as David Blanchflower told me, such talk is premature – about a decade premature, at least (which in economist-speak means there is no certainty that these measures will delivered anything very reliable, ever.)

I’ve observed and been involved in a few projects that might, in part, have aimed at aiding human wellbeing and they are characterised by two qualities. They are local and personal. By local, I mean that they arise out of the particularities of a locality. By personal, I mean that they depend very much on the personalities of the individuals involved. The difficulty with making such projects part of a political programme is that they don’t readily scale – for the reason that they flourish when they are local and personal. In short, the right level at which to nurture them is the civic – in schools, in churches, in charities. Government should basically keep out, beyond supplying the funding.