The Rap on Happiness
Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries — just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it. The fashion is to bemoan happiness studies and positive psychology as being the work not of the Devil (the Devil is kind of cool), but of morons. “No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness,” Charlotte Brontë wrote in 1853. “What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould and tilled with manure.”
In Bright-Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich recently looked with dismay at what she views as the industry of happiness, a culture bludgeoned by insistent — even aggressive — good cheer. Ehrenreich, a breast cancer survivor (as she points out, neither the designation “victim” nor “patient” is regarded with much favor), was appalled and articulate about the shortcomings of the pink-and-fluffy approach to cancer. Not everyone shares her aversion to that affirmation-heavy culture of support, but I do, and I don’t object to her snarking about the power of positive thinking, either. (It doesn’t prevent cancer; it doesn’t even prevent colds.) A book published two years ago was actually titled Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. Its author, a professor of English named Eric G. Wilson, wasn’t really against happiness, of course; he was against obtuse, simple-minded complacency, which he thought some people might confuse with happiness.
It is true that ever since Americans began turning away from Calvinism (and who could blame them: long winters, smallpox and eternal hellfire?), the country has been a breeding ground for good news, for the selling of paths to contentment. The quick-witted and genteel opportunism of Mary Baker Eddy and the medicine-free healing mantras of Christian Science begat Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking” and every other “Think Your Way to Wealth and/or Happiness” coach from Father Divine to Suzanne Somers to Deepak Chopra. With questions like “Are you tired of being a victim?” “Do you feel stuck?” “Is something missing?” “Is life passing you by?,” there have been a lot of people giving happiness if not a bad name, then certainly a moist, oily “spray-on tan with a side of cash” kind of name. Read Article
By Amy Bloom