Are you happy? Do you strive to be happy?
If you’re not feeling happy, do you feel discontented, unfulfilled, or unsuccessful?
Welcome to the ‘happiness imperative’ world!
A place where it is your duty to be happy.
Introduction
This essay explores the growing societal demand commanding us that it is our duty to be happy. This voice from the Big Other (society’s super-ego) is so expansive and pervasive, unrelenting and repetitive, that it has become the taken-for-granted discourse that cannot be questioned. This essay explores what has happened and the consequences, claiming that the happiness imperative leads to less happy societies, not more happy ones.
A Society of Commanded Enjoyment1
In 2012, the UN introduced an International Happiness Day stating happiness as a fundamental human right and goal for all. Hard to argue with... of course we all want to be happy, and we should strive for happy societies, and yet...
The introduction of this happiness day reflects how the happiness imperative2 has reached epidemic proportions. Positive psychologists, life-coaches, self-help gurus, and now politicians and the United Nations are demanding that we strive for happiness. We might say that the ‘happiness imperative’ has become institutionalised and normalised to such an extent it is no longer questioned.
Trite slogans are offered, ‘Discover your true self’, ‘Love yourself more’, ‘Do what makes you happy’, ‘Happiness is contagious’, and ‘Follow your dreams and achieve all you desire’. But this constant demand on us to be happy, coming from multiple directions, is an oppressive force.
It’s your duty to be happy
Let’s take a step back for a moment and look at what’s really happening here.
We find ourselves living in a ‘society of commanded enjoyment’,3 a society that places demands on us (at an unconscious level) that we acquiesce to the ‘happiness imperative’. If we are not happy, we self-assess ourselves, and peers assess us, to be a failure. We let ourselves and others down, for lacking the positivity that comes with being happy.
This is the paradox, the social injunction that demands we are happy, actually makes us less happy because of the unrealistic, unnecessary and inhuman pressure it applies to each of us. U.N take note!
To be human is to experience a whole range of emotional states, happiness being just one of many that are vital for us to live an engaged and fulfilling life. To be reflective, sad, contented, loved, unloved, melancholic, angry, excited, bored, frustrated, delighted and many more feelings and experiences are what it means to live a full life.
Happiness is a by-product of living a good life, not a goal to achieve.
To be happy may be a by-product of living a full life, yet as soon as we strive for happiness itself as a goal, we miss the point.
Whilst we like to think we are acting independently as we strive for happiness, we are simply conforming to a very recent social demand. In the past (and in other cultures) social demands were/are different. For example, ‘work hard and be humble’, ‘be grateful for small pleasures’ and ‘keep a stiff upper lip’. These social injunctions would have made the social command to strive for happiness seem like a narcissistic, selfish endeavour (perhaps it is!).
The ‘society of prohibition’ existed in the pre-1960s, where the injunction was ‘though shalt not!’ Institutions such as the church, schools and government carried and accepted voice of authority, they were widely respected/accepted and became the Big Other that said No! Your duty was to offer to serve others, not to please yourself.
The ‘society of commanded enjoyment’ The 1960s counter-culture challenged this institutional authority, privileging individualism, identity politics, free choice, and even free love, and we entered a new space that opened the way for the happiness imperative. These social movements of anti-authoritarian hippies and activists were not long in being outsiders, as the commercial world realised that this new energy and desire for individual choice was a great business model! Consumer capitalism co-opted the ideas and energy, realising that the ‘society of commanded enjoyment’ blitzed away the social messages of self-denial and post-war frugality, and opened the doors to a world where the links to happiness, freedom and individual choice could be harnessed through consumerism. Buy this and it will make you happy!
Both of these social injunctions are problematic in different ways, and have strengths, yet I am not advocating a return to the society of prohibition. Striving to fulfill our potential has its upsides and liberates us from former constraining forces that told us paternalistically ‘to know our place’. Yet constantly having to perform being happy and positive (even to ourselves) is a huge and impossible burden to carry.
Holding unrealistically high expectations that it is our duty and our entitlement to be happy makes us discontented, never able to fully satisfy our desires that always seem out of reach. Following the happiness imperative means judging ourselves against the imaginary ‘happy others’ we see on mainstream and social media. We strive to match their upbeat presentations and their outward (and more commonly internal) manufactured beauty. Individualisation and identity politics have exploded, and social media platforms such as Instagram, and TikTok are used to share our chosen selves with the world. We perform being happy as we want to share our best selves. This happiness imperative is a damaging social construction that needs undoing.
Internalising the message
The happiness imperative is a social injunction that speaks directly to our super-ego and says to us, “If you are not happy, you are not a good person, because you are not fulfilling your potential”. Not being happy like the celebrities we see is a fault of our own making. This, of course, is very convenient to those in governance positions who say whenever there are social problems 'it’s the individual’s fault', or as Margaret Thatcher so famously put it, 'there is no such thing as society'.
Consumer society is fed by the happiness imperative as mass marketing screams at us, ‘buy this and be happy’, ‘buy this and feel great’ offering consumer goods and services which promise happiness but deliver debt and an ever-increasing circle that feeds a lack of meaning in our lives.
Material goods bring temporary relief from feelings of emptiness or displace sad feelings in our manic buying sprees, but soon the feelings of emptiness and lack return, quickly creating a desire for the next round of consumption to take the pain away.
The happiness imperative has gone viral. Even those who believe they are living alternative lives use the same mantras as used in consumer capitalism. Do this yoga and be happy, mindfulness will bring you inner happiness, etc. Experts in our pervasive therapeutic culture offer an array of wares to help guide us to greater happiness; counselors, coaches, therapists, healers, huggers, spiritual directors, new-age physicians, and plastic surgeons… Whatever you want, the experts can deliver with their technique-driven solutions. Consume our services and happiness is just around the corner!
Furedi4 and Beradi5 claim that the happiness imperative creates the opposite effect of what is intended, citing the devastating amounts of depression, anxiety and unhappiness since society adopted this stance. Barbara Ehrenreich, focusing on the happiness imperative in the USA, claims ‘that on a personal level, it leads to self-blame and a morbid preoccupation with stamping out ‘negative thoughts... On a national level, it has brought us an era of irrational optimism resulting in disaster’.6
It is worth noting that in the USA, where positive psychology thrives and the happiness imperative is most prevalent, Americans account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants, which happen also to be the most commonly prescribed drugs in the United States.7 We live in an age of the Celebrated-Self8 where not to have a self that is worth celebrating, not to be positive, happy and successful is to not have a self at all - you become worthless, a nobody, a post-modern homo-sacer,9 an excluded exception to the social norm that demands either a celebrated-self or nothing!
So free yourself from the happiness imperative!
Realising the double-bind this puts us in, let us rid ourselves of this perverse demand that encourages us to chase an illusory fantasy of always being happy and positive. Allowing yourself not to always feel positive/happy begins by telling the super-ego voice in your head to get back in its box! Then allow yourself to feel human with all that entails, accepting your limitations, welcoming into your life the sadness, grieving, loss, pain, love, hope, joy, contentment, confusion, satisfaction, boredom, frustration, melancholy and the ambivalence of many confusing feelings.
It is all these other feelings, thoughts and emotions that make our lives so rich and so liveable. So following the purpose of my Analytic-Network Coaching company, let’s aim to ‘live the good life and create the good society’….. which means embracing all of our human experiences.
References
Stavrakakis, Y. (2008) The Lacanian left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Beradi, F. (2009) The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Stavrakakis, Y. (2008) The Lacanian left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Furedi, F. (2003) Therapy Culture. London: Rutledge
Beradi, F. (2009) The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Ehrenreich, B. (2009) Bright-Sided: How the Relentness Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books
Ehrenreich, B. (2009) Bright-Sided: How the Relentness Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books
Western S. (2012) Coaching and Mentoring a Critical Text. Sage Publishing
Agamben G. (1995) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life