2015-07-02 07:45:06
Alison Beard
From the July August 2015 Issue
Nothing depresses me more than reading about happiness. Why? Because there s
entirely too much advice out there about how to achieve it. As Fr d ric Lenoir
points out in Happiness: A Philosopher s Guide (recently translated from its
original French), great thinkers have been discussing this topic for more than
2,000 years. But opinions on it still differ. Just scan the 14,700 titles
listed in the happiness subgenre of self-help books on Amazon, or watch the
55 TED talks tagged in the same category. What makes us happy? Health, money,
social connection, purpose, flow, generosity, gratitude, inner peace,
positive thinking Research shows that any (or all?) of the above answers are
correct. Social scientists tell us that even the simplest of tricks counting
our blessings, meditating for 10 minutes a day, forcing smiles can push us into
a happier state of mind.
And yet for me and many others, happiness remains elusive. Of course, I
sometimes feel joyful and content reading a bedtime story to my kids,
interviewing someone I greatly admire, finishing a tough piece of writing. But
despite having good health, supportive family and friends, and a stimulating
and flexible job, I m often awash in negative emotions: worry, frustration,
anger, disappointment, guilt, envy, regret. My default state is dissatisfied.
The huge and growing body of happiness literature promises to lift me out of
these feelings. But the effect is more like kicking me when I m down. I know I
should be happy. I know I have every reason to be, and that I m better off than
most. I know that happier people are more successful. I know that just a few
mental exercises might help me. Still, when I m in a bad mood, it s hard to
break out of it. And I ll admit a small part of me regards my nonbliss not as
unproductive negativity but as highly productive realism. I can t imagine being
happy all the time; indeed, I m highly suspicious of anyone who claims to be.
I agreed to write this essay because over the past several years I ve sensed a
swell of support for this point of view. Barbara Ehrenreich s 2009 book
Bright-sided, about the relentless promotion and undermining effects of
positive thinking, was followed last year by Rethinking Positive Thinking, by
the NYU psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen, and The Upside of Your Dark
Side, by two experts in positive psychology, Todd Kashdan and Robert
Biswas-Diener. This year brought a terrific Psychology Today article by Matthew
Hutson titled Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down ; The Upside of
Stress, by Stanford s Kelly McGonigal; Beyond Happiness, by the British
historian and commentator Anthony Seldon; and The Happiness Industry: How the
Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, by another Brit, the Goldsmiths
lecturer in politics William Davies.
Are we finally seeing a backlash against happiness? Sort of. Most of these
recent releases rail against our modern obsession with feeling happy and
thinking positively. Oettingen explains the importance of damping sunny
fantasies with sober analysis of the obstacles in one s way. Kashdan and
Biswas-Diener s book and Hutson s article detail the benefits we derive from
all the negative emotions I cited earlier; taken together, those feelings spur
us to better our circumstances and ourselves. (The Harvard psychologist Susan
David, a coauthor of the HBR article Emotional Agility, also writes
thoughtfully on this topic.)
McGonigal shows how viewing one unhappy condition stress in a kinder light can
turn it into something that improves rather than hurts our health. Those who
accept feeling stressed as the body s natural response to a challenge are more
resilient and live longer than those who try to fight it.
Seldon describes his own progression from pleasure seeking to more-meaningful
endeavors that bring him (and should bring us) joy. Sadly, he trivializes his
advice by alphabetizing it: Accepting oneself; Belonging to a group; having
good Character, Discipline, Empathy, Focus, Generosity, and Health; using
Inquiry; embarking on an inner Journey; accepting Karma; and embracing both
Liturgy and Meditation. (One wonders what he ll use for X and Z in the next
book.)
Further Reading
Happiness: A Philosopher s Guide
Fr d ric Lenoir
Melville House, 2015
The Upside of Stress
Kelly McGonigal
Avery, 2015
Beyond Happiness
Anthony Seldon
Yellow Kite, 2015
The Happiness Industry
William Davies
Verso, 2015
Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down
Matthew Hutson
Psychology Today, 2015
Davies comes at the issue from a different angle. He s fed up with
organizational attempts to tap into what is essentially a grey mushy process
inside our brains. In his view, there s something sinister about the way
advertisers, HR managers, governments, and pharmaceutical companies are
measuring, manipulating, and ultimately making money from our insatiable desire
to be happier.
But none of these authors is arguing against individuals aspiring to have a
generally happy life. We call that the pursuit of happiness, but what we
really mean is long-term fulfillment. Martin Seligman, the father of positive
psychology, calls it flourishing and said years ago that positive emotion
(that is, feeling happy) is only one element of it, along with engagement,
relationships, meaning, and achievement. In the parlance Arianna Huffington
uses in her recent book, it s thriving, and Lenoir, whose history of
happiness philosophy is probably the most enlightening and entertaining of the
bunch, describes it as simply love of life. Who can argue against any of
those things?
Where most of the happiness gurus go wrong is insisting that daily if not
constant happiness is a means to long-term fulfillment. For some
glass-half-full optimists, that may be true. They can stumble on happiness
the way the field s most prominent researcher, Dan Gilbert, suggests; or gain
the happiness advantage that the professor-turned-consultant Shawn Achor talks
about; or broadcast happiness, as Michelle Gielan, Achor s wife and partner
at the firm GoodThink, recommends in her new book. As I said, it apparently
takes just a few simple tricks.
But for the rest of us, that much cheer feels forced, so it s unlikely to help
us mold meaningful relationships or craft the perfect career. It certainly can
t be drawn out of us by employers or other external forces. We pursue
fulfillment in different ways, without reading self-help books. And I suspect
that in the long run we ll be OK perhaps even happy.
A version of this article appeared in the July August 2015 issue (pp.130 131)
of Harvard Business Review.
Alison Beard is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.