What women want? The same as men

Last Thursday, a group of women were brought together to discuss what we really want, what would make for a better future and what makes us happy.

The results of Project Eve highlighted the fact that while previous generations were unsatisfied as stay-at-home mothers with little opportunity for work and financial independence, modern day women are not really that happy either.

That's regardless of whether they are mothers or childless, stay-at-home or in the workforce.

Sifting through the Irish research this week, I had one pressing question: Why are we focusing on women when looking at happiness?

Perhaps the only way we are going to get real answers to inner-contentment is if we stop seeing gender and start seeing each other's humanity.

The marketing industry - which is behind this qualitative study - has a long history of dividing advertising campaigns by gender, when we are all the same at our core.

The support for this is in the data itself. When speaking about the kinds of things that are making them more content, women spoke about replacing the material obsessions of the Celtic Tiger years with something more meaningful and fundamental to life. They talked about moving towards the physical and going back to basics - getting out into nature, going to parks, hiking, walking, running and cycling.

They also spoke about valuing meaningful relationships over social extravaganzas.

What do you notice about this? It can be applied to men too.

None of this insight is gender-specific. Yet for centuries society has made a habit of dividing everything about the human experience into two categories.

How our brains work, our attitudes towards relationships, sex, work, family, parenthood, our dreams and desires are all looked at from a male and female point of view when the vital things that make us human are gender-blind: the need to love and be loved; the need to be accepted and respected. The need to be seen, to feel heard and to believe that we matter. Each one of us comes into this world alone and leaves it on our own and it is the connection in between that counts.

This was again proven in the longest study ever conducted into human happiness.

Although only carried out on men, it's significance lies in the fact that it took place over 75 years and its scope stretched across rich and poor.

The conclusion? According to Robert Waldinger, director of the research at Harvard University: "Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period."

These ties help to delay mental and physical decline and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.

Perhaps that's why the Project Eve research team found that women are not any happier today - despite their greater freedoms: because, as with men, the stress and demands of modern life are getting in the way of what's important: strong and connected relationships.

In the next few years perhaps researchers can conduct another long-term study on happiness that takes in both men and women, young and old and all social classes. In the meantime we can only rely on the words of Matthieu Ricard, the 69-year-old Tibetan Buddhist monk who scientists have discovered to be "the world's happiest person".

They made their findings after a 12-year study on meditation and compassion led by neuroscientists.

After hooking a large group of Tibetan monks up to sensors during their meditations they discovered Ricard's brain radiated levels of gamma waves (happiness indicators) never reported in any other human.

The scans showed excessive activity in his brain's left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, allowing him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity.

When asked his secret, Ricard said it was to strive to be benevolent. He said thinking about yourself and how to make things better for yourself all the time is exhausting and stressful, and ultimately leads to unhappiness.

"It's not the moral ground," Ricard says. "It's simply that 'me, me, me' all day long is very stuffy. And it's quite miserable, because you instrumentalize the whole world as a threat, or as a potential sort of interest [to yourself]."

If you want to be happy, Ricard says, within reason and without being taken advantage of, you should strive to be kind. It needs no particular measure of time, it doesn't require money and it doesn't need to be carried out in the form of grand gestures. And, to his credit, it would be hard to find a man, woman or scientist who could argue with that.