Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay
A timely article has appeared in the Guardian by Kenan Malik, titled ‘Stop trying to be happy and put a smile on your face – our obsession with happiness is making countless people depressed’. I will quote it at length. It is very relevant in this time of supposed good cheer and bountiful happiness, with all the stress and anxiety around the holiday season and all.
A recent study from the University of Reading that found those who valued happiness most highly tended to show greater signs of depression. “I just found this fascinating, that people who want to be happy are actually the ones that are not happy”, Julia Vogt, one of the co-authors was reported saying.
There is a desperation in today’s western societies to be happy. It’s not that happiness is not good. Nor is it to deny that mental well being is important. But mental well being is not the same as an obsession with happiness. It is the very opposite, the Reading University article abstract suggests: ‘increased valuing happiness was associated with lower emotion attention control and lower savoring of positive experiences, which in turn was related to depressive symptoms’.
Other authors reinforce this view. Will Davies cynically observed in his book The Happiness Industry, that the aim of today’s happiness industry is not about allowing people to live a flourishing life. It is, rather, as partly a means of behaviour management on the part of both governments and private enterprise, to ensure a more pliant society and a more productive and profitable one.
And the psychologist Peter Bloom observes that happiness is also partly a means of ‘self-optimisation’, by which, ‘small-scale personal empowerment’ goes hand in hand with ‘large-scale social disempowerment’.
Aristotle argued that “eudaimonia” (which is often translated as happiness, but is probably better thought of as meaning a flourishing life) is the only thing that humans desire for their own sake. He did not mean by this that it is an end we should set out to seek but, rather, the end we can achieve if we live our life well.
Fascinating stuff.
Kenan ends by saying: Happiness is not, and cannot be, a goal in itself. It can only be the by-product of other goals. To seek happiness is a bit like trying to be cool. The more you are desperate for it, the less you will be.
In the chapter on emotion in my book How the Brain Thinks, I suggest that our base emotional state is binary, either anxious or not, and that happiness may just be an absence of anxiety. Kenan reinforces the view that searching for happiness may be irrelevant, in fact it may not exist. In today’s echo-chamber world of dominant social media stereotypes, it is nice to think that it is how we live our life, not how we look that is important. To paraphrase Aristotle: an unexamined life is not worth living. An over -examined photogenic life may be also.
Happy New Year and all the best for 2020.
