Chris Johns

Initially, it was just pencil and paper.

Because it was the 1930s, it was just men.

But it's continued until the present day, and they've moved on from pen and paper.

They've collected all this data, and they now do it with whiz-bang technology to ask all sorts of questions about well-being and happiness.

And there's a massive amount of research around all of this data that's been generated by each graduating class of Harvard since the 1930s, so nearly a century's worth of data now.

And when you see the TED Talks of the lead investigators on this study give their hour-long presentations, they always start or finish or usually both with the same thing.

The thing that best predicts a long and happy life is how much you pick up the phone to each other.

And human connection from that study and from many others is the thing that makes us most happy.

I put it more strongly than that.

I think money, because I've worked in the world of money for many years now and met many, many very, very rich people.

And I would make some broad generalizations about them in the same way I did about Mr. Musk is that most of them are as miserable as sin.

Money is very alienating.

It drives people mad.

They start imagining all sorts of paranoid things like people are after their money.

They start distrusting their friends and their relatives who are poorer than them about, are they after my money?

They inevitably end up absolutely hating and loathing all forms of government because all government represents to them is a tax grab.

And so they end up buying newspapers and media organizations and or forming political parties to make sure that nobody ever takes their money away from them and so on and so on.

So my point being, of course, is that looping it all the way back to where we started is that we have these peculiar beliefs, despite the fact that we actually know

what makes us happy, and what makes us content.

I mean, happiness and contentment are two quite different things in my book.