…is a chapter title of America the Anxious, a book I recently finished on audiobook. Of all the journalism I’ve come across, this book ranks amongst the most insightful. As usual, I will present a selected summary of the book before offering some of my own perspectives.
The book
The book documents the “happiness industry”, originated from the US but is rapidly spreading across the globe, which builds on the premise that happiness is largely a personal project. The book documents the extensive influence of this way of thinking, from corporate management to early childhood education, from the consumption of news through social media to forcing welfare recipients to take mindfulness trainings. The book strings together a series of familiar observations to reveal a startling cultural trend of the libertarian “just blame the poor”.
Hidden in the uplifting narrative of “you can make yourself happier” is the apathetic undertone of “therefore it’s not my responsibility as your employer/ elected official/ someone with power to make you happy”. In the beginning, Whippman starts by exploring a number of corporate “happiness projects”, where people pay a lot of money to go to mindfulness seminars and meditation retreats that are supposed to make them happier. She noticed three shared features of these efforts: first, these programs are almost always solitary, despite research showing the benefit of social support in people’s emotional well-being. Second, they are almost always based on the premise (implicitly or explicitly) that whatever bad things that have happened and have made people sad — from childhood abuse to ongoing systematic injustice — are entirely the victims’ own fault. And that, by changing perspectives, these unfortunate events can be turned into something positive. Third, these programs often discourage or even prohibit displays of negative emotions, causing those who are truly suffering to feel a need to hide. In fact, Whippman’s central thesis (as indicated by the title of the book) is that the pervasive sentiment of “there’s something wrong with you if you are not happy all the time” makes Americans more anxious than anything else. (Though- this thesis isn’t my focus in this post.)
Whippman then documents the same trend in a number of other domains of life. In management, the happiness narrative is often used to justify longer work hours, higher expected productivity, less pay, fewer benefits, and less vacation time. In early childhood education, young children are taught not only that they are the best in all aspects, but also sometimes that they shouldn’t thank people or apologize too much. It really is the training of future jerks if you ask me.
The book then turns to something even more troubling. Everyone knows that the currency in the social media age is “like” and “share”. Many of you probably also know that people sometimes pretend to lead different lives than their real ones in order to be popular online. Despite some evidence showing that increased use of Facebook makes students more depressed, it is probably relatively harmless if all there is is to occasionally make fun of the person who faked a vacation in Hawaii. The real problem begins, as is always the case, when Big Data enters the scene. Whippman explains that social media news sources like Upworthy or BuzzFeed algorithmically optimize their content for more “likes” and “shares”. Compounded with the fact that people are more likely to share positive news than negative ones, this means that the social-media-based news (which is the primary source of news for many people, including me) are often purged of “negative” or “serious” words like “racism”, “sexism”, or even “democrats” and “republicans”. This is worrying.
Whippman’s last topic is positive psychology, which is a new branch of psychology started in 1998 by Martin Seligman. The idea, as I learned in school, was to shift the focus of psychology from pathologies and disorder to more preventative approaches of studying what makes people happy or successful. This sounds pretty reasonable as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of also studying pathologies and suffering. However, Whippman documents that the discipline of positive psychology is often used to dress victim-blaming in the combined disguise of self-help and scientism. The core of the project is, again, the dual theses of “you can always improve your own well-being” and “therefore, if you are suffering, it’s entirely your own fault”. This is not helped by the fact that positive psychology is heavily funded by the right-wing conservative Templeton Foundation, and that many prominent positive psychologists sell books off of their research. The conflict of interest has, unsurprisingly, caused systematic methodological problems in the field.
My thoughts
Listening through this book, to me, is like many scattered thoughts being strung together, finally forming a coherent, if alarming, picture. I’ll share two (somewhat unrelated) aspects.
I have been interested in this phenomenon of internalization for awhile (also: looking for suggestions of a better name). My main interest has been the reification of personality traits and aptitudes such as intelligence. Basically, I’m interested in the kind of evidence available/possible to support claims of not just “you and I behave differently in similar circumstances” but “this is because you have one personality and I have another”. Personality traits and intelligence considered in this way seem to carry certain kinds of causal forces — they explain why you and I act differently, rather than just a redescription of the fact that we act differently. This is especially pronounced when people look for biological bases of trait differences or structure aspects of society in response to them.
A historic project I’d like to pursue after I’m done with what I’m doing now is on the concept of grit. I have expressed my skepticism about this concept before, but I think it has a fascinating (and, importantly, short) history. If I’m right, the history goes something like this: the study of at-risk youths has been a large area for quite some time. Around the time where positive psychology was started, psychologists (quite sensibly, I think) decided to study youths who had a lot of risk-factors (e.g., childhood abuse) but nevertheless turned out alright. This led to the study of protective factors (e.g., supportive adult role-model). However, there are youths who, without any identifiable protective factors, still turned out alright. The concept of “resilience” was often used to describe this phenomenon.
My knowledge of the story ends here. A few years later, I started hearing about resilience as a personality trait, as well as other associated traits like grit and hardiness. (But they are totally not the same because this one is from MY lab and the others are from those other labs.) My hypothesis is that, because no one could find anything environmental that could have been protective, the natural assumption is that it must be the youths themselves. But saying “these three at-risk children, through their own forces, made it out alright despite all odds” is very different from saying “there must be one personality trait that these children have in common which is responsible for their later success”.
I won’t say more about this since I haven’t done a lot of research on it yet.
My second observation concerns the narrative frequently found in these happiness talks: Shocking! Science shows how mindfulness is more important than money at making you happy. I have already mentioned Whippman’s report on the problems with mindfulness science, in that many of these studies are of extremely poor quality. Here is another perspective.
I recently came across this blog post, titled Impossibly hungry judges. It is about the famous study on how judges give out harsher sentences immediately before lunch, and more lenient ones immediately after. The study has been criticized for its methodology, but this blog post offers an interesting perspective.
The author argues that, with the claimed effect size as big as it is (0% favourable decision before lunch; 60%+ favourable decision after), it is impossible for us to not notice it
If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Just like manufacturers take size differences between men and women into account when producing items such as golf clubs or watches, we would stop teaching in the time before lunch, doctors would not schedule surgery, and driving before lunch would be illegal. If a psychological effect is this big, we don’t need to discover it and publish it in a scientific journal – you would already know it exists.
This highlights, I think, a fundamental truth that is often forgotten — social science studies what we experience. In some cases, it reveals subtle but systematic patterns we have not noticed, but the power of social science to “shock us” is intrinsically limited. If something is extremely shocking, it is probably worth looking at twice.
Coming back to the topic of mindfulness and money. I don’t really know of anyone who genuinely believes that money is irrelevant to happiness. If that’s true, many people wouldn’t be working and money probably would not have been invented in the first place. It’s almost definitely true that money isn’t the only thing (or, possibly, the most important thing) that matters and that there is a diminished marginal return concerning the amount of happiness money can bring us. But the amount of evidence one would need to overcome something so commonsensical needs to be extraordinary.
Can mindfulness help? Maybe. But good living conditions, good friends, good health, and good society are certainly, just as common sense tells you, more important to our happiness.
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