Happiness is in many ways the marketing breakthrough of the past decade, with self-care and anti-stress products now rounding out the bestseller list on Amazon (think of ‘gravity blankets’, ‘de-stressing’ adult colouring books and fidget spinners), where they nestle alongside chart-topping tomes by ‘happiness bloggers’. All of this is made possible by a specific, disturbing and very new version of ‘happiness’ that holds that bad feelings must be avoided at all costs.
This imperative to avoid being – even appearing – unhappy has led to a culture that rewards a performative happiness, in which people curate public-facing lives, via Instagram and its kin, composed of a string of ‘peak experiences’ – and nothing else. Sadness and disappointment are rejected, even neutral or mundane life experiences get airbrushed out of the frame. It’s as though appearing unhappy implies some kind of Protestant moral fault: as if you didn’t work hard enough or believe sufficiently in yourself.
Happiness has, of course, not always been conceived of this way. The Epicurean outlook on happiness – which Thomas Jefferson was thinking of when he enjoined Americans to cherish ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence – is exceedingly simple and different. As Epicurus saw it, happiness is merely the lack of aponia – physical pain – and ataraxia – mental disturbance. It was not about the pursuit of material gain, or notching up gratifying experiences, but instead was a happiness that lent itself to a constant gratefulness. So long as we are not in mental or physical pain, we can, within this understanding of happiness, be contented. (...)
Not all happiness movements retain as close a relation to Epicurean ideas. Positive psychology, for instance, became voguish after Martin Seligman chose happiness as his core theme in 1998, after becoming president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Seligman proposed that happiness came from having and searching for positive emotions, a sense of community and existential meaning. He believed that humans tend to ‘learn’ unhappiness in choosing not to escape unpleasant situations even when we can. On this view, happiness is something we must constantly teach ourselves: it is something we work towards.
From here, it’s only a small leap to today’s widespread understanding of happiness as the pursuit and purchase of peak experience. Prescription antidepressants are consumed at record levels, self-help books crowd the shelves, and multiple therapies compete to shift us out of negative mindsets so that we might flourish. All of this is work, but of a particular variety, in which every moment is optimised in order to achieve peak happiness, no matter how fleeting, at the same time as unhappiness is actively pushed away.
But it’s a concept riddled with problems. ‘What is happiness?’ asks the fictional advertising executive Don Draper in Mad Men, in neo-Hobbesian mode, before answering: ‘It’s the moment before you need more happiness.’ These days, we pursue happiness rather than letting it come to us. We try to collect moments of happiness like shells at the beach, even as the waves wash them away. The pursuit is Sisyphean; it inevitably leads down a disappointing path.
There is no image of modern existential emptiness quite like the person travelling the world while constantly posting pictures of restaurants and landmarks on social media, and competitively performing happiness at the expense of making genuine connections with his peers. In trying to be happier – better – than others, this person risks alienating himself from them. It’s a zero-sum game. (...)
The fetish for pursuing happiness appears to be a peculiarly Anglo-American phenomenon, perhaps because there is such strong cultural pressure in both countries to downplay negative emotions. Compared with, say, the French, who are generally content to live outside of happiness – happiness being unsophisticated, not the marker of a life well lived – Brits and, most especially, Americans downplay negative emotions in favour of putting forth the happiest face possible. Americans are known for the fake smile and ‘I’m good, thanks!’ while Brits are renowned for avoiding conversational unpleasantness, and for maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of pain and disappointment. Denying and masking negative feelings, because they are socially and culturally unacceptable, is the norm. In the Anglo-American scheme of thinking, negative emotions are negatively reflective of us – as if we’ve made a fundamental mistake, lived without the gusto and positivity needed to achieve happiness.
But all of this happy pretending catches up. A person living in a Western culture is about four to 10 times more likely to develop clinical depression or anxiety than a person in an Eastern culture, according to the psychologist Brock Bastian’s book, The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living (2018). In China and Japan, Bastian writes, people tend to view positive and negative emotions as essential and equal; happiness, in the East, should not be actively pursued, just as sadness should not be actively avoided. Bastian sources this stance in religion, especially those Buddhist philosophies that seek to embrace the entirety of the human condition and to comprehend pain in terms of its underlying reasons.
The desire to twist our negative emotions into something upbeat is a way of thinking that leaves us open to the kind of ad-man manipulation in which Watson specialised. But it’s not a desire that entered our culture from a vacuum. There’s a significant economic incentive for businesses when people believe that happiness is something that we must work – and buy – toward. Happy workers tend to be about 12 per cent more productive. Google has a ‘chief happiness officer’. The ‘treat-yourself’ ethic is still a major sales driver, and nearly every beauty brand now bases its advertisements on ‘self-care’. Meanwhile, the APA revised its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) so that any bereaved person grieving longer than two months might be considered to have a mental illness requiring medical treatment – for example, antidepressants such as Wellbutrin.
If Wellbutrin sounds a bit like the happiness-inducing drug ‘soma’ in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), it’s probably because it – and all of this happiness conditioning – is a bit Huxleyan. With the rise of positive psychology in the midcentury, which piggybacks on Hobbes’s 17th-century ideas, Huxley foresaw how the Epicurean ideal of happiness was being – and would be – transformed. ‘The right to the pursuit of happiness,’ he wrote in 1956, ‘is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.’
[ed. See also: Can You Overdose on Happiness? (Nautilus).]
This imperative to avoid being – even appearing – unhappy has led to a culture that rewards a performative happiness, in which people curate public-facing lives, via Instagram and its kin, composed of a string of ‘peak experiences’ – and nothing else. Sadness and disappointment are rejected, even neutral or mundane life experiences get airbrushed out of the frame. It’s as though appearing unhappy implies some kind of Protestant moral fault: as if you didn’t work hard enough or believe sufficiently in yourself.
Happiness has, of course, not always been conceived of this way. The Epicurean outlook on happiness – which Thomas Jefferson was thinking of when he enjoined Americans to cherish ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence – is exceedingly simple and different. As Epicurus saw it, happiness is merely the lack of aponia – physical pain – and ataraxia – mental disturbance. It was not about the pursuit of material gain, or notching up gratifying experiences, but instead was a happiness that lent itself to a constant gratefulness. So long as we are not in mental or physical pain, we can, within this understanding of happiness, be contented. (...)Not all happiness movements retain as close a relation to Epicurean ideas. Positive psychology, for instance, became voguish after Martin Seligman chose happiness as his core theme in 1998, after becoming president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Seligman proposed that happiness came from having and searching for positive emotions, a sense of community and existential meaning. He believed that humans tend to ‘learn’ unhappiness in choosing not to escape unpleasant situations even when we can. On this view, happiness is something we must constantly teach ourselves: it is something we work towards.
From here, it’s only a small leap to today’s widespread understanding of happiness as the pursuit and purchase of peak experience. Prescription antidepressants are consumed at record levels, self-help books crowd the shelves, and multiple therapies compete to shift us out of negative mindsets so that we might flourish. All of this is work, but of a particular variety, in which every moment is optimised in order to achieve peak happiness, no matter how fleeting, at the same time as unhappiness is actively pushed away.
But it’s a concept riddled with problems. ‘What is happiness?’ asks the fictional advertising executive Don Draper in Mad Men, in neo-Hobbesian mode, before answering: ‘It’s the moment before you need more happiness.’ These days, we pursue happiness rather than letting it come to us. We try to collect moments of happiness like shells at the beach, even as the waves wash them away. The pursuit is Sisyphean; it inevitably leads down a disappointing path.
There is no image of modern existential emptiness quite like the person travelling the world while constantly posting pictures of restaurants and landmarks on social media, and competitively performing happiness at the expense of making genuine connections with his peers. In trying to be happier – better – than others, this person risks alienating himself from them. It’s a zero-sum game. (...)
The fetish for pursuing happiness appears to be a peculiarly Anglo-American phenomenon, perhaps because there is such strong cultural pressure in both countries to downplay negative emotions. Compared with, say, the French, who are generally content to live outside of happiness – happiness being unsophisticated, not the marker of a life well lived – Brits and, most especially, Americans downplay negative emotions in favour of putting forth the happiest face possible. Americans are known for the fake smile and ‘I’m good, thanks!’ while Brits are renowned for avoiding conversational unpleasantness, and for maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’ in the face of pain and disappointment. Denying and masking negative feelings, because they are socially and culturally unacceptable, is the norm. In the Anglo-American scheme of thinking, negative emotions are negatively reflective of us – as if we’ve made a fundamental mistake, lived without the gusto and positivity needed to achieve happiness.
But all of this happy pretending catches up. A person living in a Western culture is about four to 10 times more likely to develop clinical depression or anxiety than a person in an Eastern culture, according to the psychologist Brock Bastian’s book, The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living (2018). In China and Japan, Bastian writes, people tend to view positive and negative emotions as essential and equal; happiness, in the East, should not be actively pursued, just as sadness should not be actively avoided. Bastian sources this stance in religion, especially those Buddhist philosophies that seek to embrace the entirety of the human condition and to comprehend pain in terms of its underlying reasons.
The desire to twist our negative emotions into something upbeat is a way of thinking that leaves us open to the kind of ad-man manipulation in which Watson specialised. But it’s not a desire that entered our culture from a vacuum. There’s a significant economic incentive for businesses when people believe that happiness is something that we must work – and buy – toward. Happy workers tend to be about 12 per cent more productive. Google has a ‘chief happiness officer’. The ‘treat-yourself’ ethic is still a major sales driver, and nearly every beauty brand now bases its advertisements on ‘self-care’. Meanwhile, the APA revised its fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) so that any bereaved person grieving longer than two months might be considered to have a mental illness requiring medical treatment – for example, antidepressants such as Wellbutrin.
If Wellbutrin sounds a bit like the happiness-inducing drug ‘soma’ in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World (1932), it’s probably because it – and all of this happiness conditioning – is a bit Huxleyan. With the rise of positive psychology in the midcentury, which piggybacks on Hobbes’s 17th-century ideas, Huxley foresaw how the Epicurean ideal of happiness was being – and would be – transformed. ‘The right to the pursuit of happiness,’ he wrote in 1956, ‘is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.’
by Cody Delistraty, Aeon | Read more:
Image: David Pollack/Corbis/Getty[ed. See also: Can You Overdose on Happiness? (Nautilus).]
