Happiness Lab: Youth’s Stuff of Happiness

The Happiness Lab is an ongoing project led by London-based performance artist Harold Offeh that explores the concept of happiness. There is a lot being written and produced about the new ‘science’ of happiness that tries to examine why, despite a good standard of living in Europe and most developed countries, people aren’t any happier than they were 50 years ago. The ‘science’ also looks at how you measure happiness. The BBC recently did a series called ‘Making Slough Happy’, Slough being the depressed town from TV’s ‘The Office’. They got a group of ‘happiness’ experts and gurus to try and help people live happier lives by changing their behavioural patterns and thinking.

Harold is interested in how we might go about trying to quantify a philosophical concept like happiness, a subject that ties in many other areas of thought from economics to religion. Exploring the theme of happiness with young people is more complex than with adults because adults often prescribe how young people feel without real awareness of their social and personal lives.