Anthropologist Daniel Miller spent 16 months living in a town in Ireland – he calls it Cuan, it’s actually Skerries near Dublin – whose inhabitants were amazingly happy. His insights could help us all in the quest for fulfilment

Why write a book on the good enough life right now? We live in a restless world. Over the centuries, hundreds of millions of people have migrated in search of a better life. Consider those who have over time colonised the lands of North America, reducing the indigenous people to a small remnant.

Or consider the 250 million people who more recently have migrated to industrial regions of China and were the subject of a wonderful study by Xinyuan Wang comparing their migration from rural areas to work in factories with their simultaneous migration from offline to online.

Many contemporary migrants are refugees from war and oppression. The most impoverished rarely have the resources to undertake such migrations. The majority, such as in the case of the vast Chinese migration, move in search of “a better life”.

What this term “a better life” implies is that they seek the security of a higher income or a better health service or the opportunities of education for their children, as well as escape from struggle and coercion. For many such migrants, the aspiration is to seek a largely middle-class and suburban lifestyle, which they hope to achieve over one or more generations.

This then raises some rather important questions. How should we regard this middle-class, suburban, settled life that most of the world now aspires to? Is this a perfectly reasonable ideal, the sort of life that pretty much everyone could and should emulate?

Is there some plausible concept of the good enough life, or of life purpose, that this lifestyle corresponds to? Or is it an illusion or a trap, an image created by the wider political economy, these days often glibly termed “neo-liberal capitalism”, in order to sell us a lifestyle to which we sheepishly conform?

Rather than reaching some ideal, have we fallen into a muddy rut along the way? In the past, the only way of conceiving of an ideal life would have been through sketching out some version of a speculative utopia. But in the 21st century, quite a few migrants have largely achieved the life they sought, in countries where that is how much of the population now live.

Instead of speculative utopias, we are in a position to appraise the very ordinary lives of millions of people, living in versions of a middle-class, suburban lifestyle within a welfare state. If this lifestyle already exists and can be observed, then we have reached the point where we can consider the value of such lives.

Ireland is a largely middle-class country with a centrist government and a welfare state. Cuan – my fictional name for the town I studied – could be considered suburban in that it is within commuter distance from Dublin.

The population who form the backbone of this book seem to correspond, then, to these migrant aspirations. One of the groups deliberately included within the ethnography were migrants from outside of Ireland who have settled in Cuan. There were not many such migrants because Cuan is a relatively expensive place to live, but those who became research participants regarded the town as a clear fulfilment of their ideals as migrants.

On occasion when discussing this book with other social scientists, the result has been a horrified expression. Why am I not studying people in poverty or the highly oppressed? Don’t I know how much people around the world are suffering?

As it happens, most of my previous work has been with such populations. I have lived for considerable periods with people who had no toilet of any kind other than the fields, only intermittent electricity, and could afford just two meals a day rather than three. I have published a book about a hospice whose patients had received a terminal diagnosis and were dying.

It is important to observe and report on deprivation, struggle, and suffering. But it is also important to write about lives outside of these conditions.

One of the limitations of disciplines such as psychology and much social science is that, if we are mainly engaged with the problems and pathologies of modern life, in order perhaps to assist in such situations, the result is a strange perspective that sees so much in the world from the viewpoint of pathology.

By contrast, the remit of anthropology is first and foremost to explore the cultural diversity of humanity and help all of us to understand empathetically what it means to be other than who we are. Anthropology is currently trying to make this a more egalitarian pursuit in repudiation of its colonial and privileged origins.

All populations should be equal in the possibility of becoming the subject of some inquisitive anthropologist and also in the possibility of becoming an anthropologist. This was another reason for embarking on a study of a population that is slightly more affluent than the UK, where I live.

Whenever I hear people tell me (as they often do) that, “Oh, they would be of interest to an anthropologist, you should study them,” I sigh, because anthropology should regard no population as more authentic or interesting than any other.

It is essential to anthropology that we, too, should be examined for our weird cultural beliefs and assumptions that other people find astonishing and in need of explanation. Otherwise, we will assume that somehow our beliefs are more natural and obvious, and it is only others who require such investigations.

Like most of my research participants, I am middle class and suburban and I found many things that we held in common. But I also found people in Cuan to be remarkably different in their approach to life than those I had written about in a previous ethnography of a similar-sized population in a fieldsite just outside London. (I am myself a Londoner.) It is reasonable to see Cuan as the kind of society many people aspire to, but beyond that it is hard to regard it as typical.

This is an extract from The Good Enough Life by Daniel Miller (Polity, £17.99). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Daniel Miller is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday 1 February 6-7pm. Free to subscribers.

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