zeThe Happiness Ruse
Cody Delistraty
In 1920, the American psychologist John B Watson published the results of one of
the more ethically dubious scholarly articles of the past century. Along with Rosalie
Rayner, a 21-year old graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore,
where he taught, Watson aimed to instil a specific fear in an otherwise normal baby.
Until then, behavioural conditioning had been exercised solely within the animal
realm, but Watson and Rayner selected a nine-month-old boy they called ‘Albert’ for
their study, paid his mother a dollar, and placed a variety of small, live animals in
front of him, including a rat – in which he initially showed a playful interest. As Albert
played with the rat, the experimenters hit a nearby steel bar with a hammer, emitting
a loud noise that scared the boy and made him cry. After doing this a few times, all
the experimenters had to do to make Albert burst into tears was to show him the rat.
Even without the noise, they successfully conditioned in him a fear of rats, which
eventually carried over to a fear of numerous furry creatures, including rabbits and
dogs.
One would think that such an unprincipled experiment might have led to some kind of
public outcry – after all, the experimenters never deconditioned Albert – or even
scientific objection, since there was no consistent control; nonetheless, it seemed to
show that humans, not just animals, could be behaviourally conditioned in myriad
ways. In fact, following the article’s publication, Johns Hopkins raised Watson’s
salary by 50 per cent to keep him at the university. (He was already popular: a year
earlier, students had voted him ‘handsomest professor’.) But then, after his wife
discovered and published the love letters he’d written to Rayner, with whom he’d
been having an affair and would go on to marry, the university fired him.
Watson quickly landed in advertising, where J Walter Thompson hired him to continue
his work conditioning humans, specifically consumers. ‘I began to learn that it can be
just as thrilling to watch the growth of a sales curve of a new product as to watch the
learning curve of animals and men,’ Watson later reflected. Bringing a scientific
ethos to advertising, he was tasked with instilling brand loyalty, creating product
personalities, and, as he and Rayner had done with baby Albert, instilling fears in
consumers in order to get them to buy certain products. For the Scott’s toilet paper
account, for instance, he helped to create a print advertisement in which surgeons
are looking at a patient, while the text below says ‘and the trouble began with harsh
toilet tissue’ as a way of scaring and selling.
Today, such behavioural manipulations are the norm, but they take subtler and more
sinister forms, thanks to Big Data and a digital environment in which algorithmic
surveillance is more or less omnipresent. But rather than conditioning specific fears,
it’s now more common to find human happiness the target of psychological
manipulation. 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.
One can see this understanding of happiness across the foundations of the Western
world, as in the Jewish prayer of asher yatzar, in which each morning, after going to
the bathroom, one says thanks for being able to achieve even this most basic task
under one’s own power. Happiness, in the Epicurean sense, is as simple as being
able to go pee.
Modern thinkers tend to view happiness less as a lack of pain than as a surfeit of
wellbeing. The English economist Richard Layard, for example, laid out what might
be considered a ‘happiness economics’ – now forming the basis of an annual survey
called the World Happiness Report, which measures the extent to which a person’s
income and a society’s wealth influence happiness. However, like Epicurus, Layard
still regards mental health as the most important factor in happiness, as he
explained in his book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005).
All of this is work, in which every moment is optimised in order to achieve peak
happiness
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.
Where, historically, did this idea of ‘peak experience’ happiness come from? When the
word ‘happy’ first entered the English lexicon, around the mid-14th century, it meant
something closer to ‘lucky’, since one’s status, health and happiness were wrapped
up in the arbitrary decisions of the Catholic God. (It’s most likely that the word ‘luck’
came first and, from that came words such as ‘happy’, related to ‘happenstance’.)
Happy didn’t mean joyful until the 16th century, and it was not until the mid-17th
century when Thomas Hobbes, writing in Leviathan, cast happiness as an unending
process of accumulating objects of desire, thereby redefining it as a subjective,
shifting feeling, predicated on our desires. ‘The felicity of this life,’ wrote Hobbes in
1651, ‘consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis
ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the
books of the old moral philosophers.’
As Hobbes saw it, happiness could be meaningfully achieved by pursuing pleasurable
experiences. He believed that there was no stable satisfaction (‘the repose of a mind
satisfied’), and took indirect aim at Epicurus (‘in the books of the old moral
philosophers’); happiness, he believed, must be continually sought after, its slippery
and fleeting nature interpreted as a feature rather than a bug. If one had to say where
the modern conception of ‘peak experience’ happiness derives, then Hobbes’s
then-aberrant idea is probably the place to start.
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.
Perhaps one solution to the quandary of happiness – we want to be happy but not to
alienate or hurt ourselves on the path to it – lies in realigning ourselves with the
Romantics, who embraced both their joys and sorrows. ‘Ay, in the very temple of
Delight,’ wrote John Keats in ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (1819), ‘Veil’d Melancholy has her
sovran shrine’. During Passover, Jews discard drops of wine before they drink so as
to remember tragedies before embracing pleasures (so, too, when observant Jews
marry: to step on a glass is to remember sadness as you embark upon a life of
happiness). This embrace of melancholy might be a way out of the lose-lose prison of
happiness, whereby pursuing it leads to disappointment and loneliness, and not
pursuing it seems to guarantee that it’s never reached. We might never be truly
contented unless we embrace our negative feelings. Indeed, negative feelings might
not be so negative.
The emotion of sadness, for instance, has all kinds of positive uses. Recent studies
by the social psychologist Joseph P Forgas at the University of New South Wales in
Sydney showed that people remembered the details of a shop more accurately when
the weather was bad and they were in a foul mood than when the weather was more
pleasant and they were happier, leading him to speculate that sadness could be
useful to memory. Forgas also showed that
people tend to make more accurate judgments when sad since we’re more aware
and less gullible, relying more on what’s actually witnessed than on broad-strokes
ideas and stereotypes. Sadness also makes us better communicators and
persuaders, according to his 2007 study, and we are better conversationalists –
more adept at interpreting nuance and ambiguity – when sad than happy,
according to his 2013 study.
One need not actively court sadness, but nor should sadness be something we simply
plough through – grinning and bearing – on the path toward happiness. People in sad
moods, according to Forgas, tend to be more persistent and hardworking in complex
mental tasks than happier people, not only attempting more questions but getting
more of the questions correct than their happier counterparts. Sadness is a
sharpening emotion. It keeps us alert. It makes us investigate ourselves more
profoundly and more unsparingly. To be sad is to be keenly attuned to the world.
It’s nice to eat dessert, but the burst of happiness we get does little for our
evolutionary bottom line
Just being willing to grapple with difficult emotions leads to greater life satisfaction. A
few years ago, 365 people aged 14 to 88 who were considered emotionally stable
were given smartphones on which they had to answer daily questions about their
emotional health, over a period of three weeks. The study, published in Emotion,
found that, when participants reported being in a negative mood, only those who
thought of negative emotions as harmful or antithetical to happiness also felt a low
satisfaction with their life. Those who believed negative emotions could be useful to
them reported the same life satisfaction, regardless of their mood, indicating that
engaging with our negative emotions might make us happier than simply pursuing
happiness itself.
The reasons for this need to embrace the negative with the positive are deeply wired
inside of us. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles
Darwin seemed to foresee that the search for happiness might be misguided, writing
that we must choose what to
emote carefully because our feelings change who we are and what we do. Being
fearful or angry can make us withdrawn, just as being sexually aroused can make us
more outgoing. But in evolutionary terms, the emotions at either end of the spectrum
– intense happiness, intense sadness – are only proximate outcomes. They are
important to how we feel: but, in a grander evolutionary sense, they’re important only
insofar as they drive us toward survival and reproduction. Alone, they are rather
meaningless: it might be nice to have a delicious dessert, for instance, but the burst
of happiness we get from eating it does little for our evolutionary bottom line. That’s
to say, the kind of happiness we work to pursue is a holdover from our ancestors,
motivating them to continue to find and eat the heartiest kinds of foods. But this kind
of happiness is not an end goal; it’s only a route toward it.
To put existential stock in pleasure and ‘feeling good’ is to misunderstand where
genuine satisfaction lies. Instead, an Epicurean happiness in which we might have
the clarity of mind to control how we feel, to handle the negative waves of feeling
that, as humans, will always come our way – these are likelier the abilities that will
lead to genuine satisfaction.
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.
Life would not be worth living if it floated o
hnly between peak experiences
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.’
Today, market research, built on Watson’s work, has only continued to grow,
pioneering in store face-scanning – to determine consumers’ emotions in front of
certain products – advertisements that seem to follow us across every digital
platform, and, eventually, the Holy Grail of market manipulation: being able to create
products that hack our happiness, that make us neurologically need to use and buy
them. (Already this exists to some extent: for example, think of how Facebook
manipulates the mood of users with its News Feed algorithms.)
But if we continue to allow ourselves to be manipulated into pining after peak
experiences, then we leave ourselves open not only to market manipulation but also
to loneliness, poor judgment and, ironically, an abiding sadness. Epicurean
happiness might not always make us
‘happy’ in the sense that we now use the word synonymously with being in an upbeat
mood. But life would not be worth living if it floated only between peak experiences.
In truth, the younger generations – those who are most likely to subscribe to the idea
of ‘peak happiness’ – aren’t really happy in any sense at all, with 22 per cent of
millennials saying they have no friends. This, surely, is not the kind of ‘happiness’ we
want to pursue.
What if, instead, happiness was something that we realised ebbs and flows, that
negativity is fundamental to life and, ironically, to our happiness? What if we
reconditioned ourselves: not to want but to be satisfied in all feelings?
