Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction – Coming to America: Obsessed with Happiness, but Nobody’s Happy
1. Personal Journey? It’s Not All About You
2. Happiness for Sale
3. Workaholics
4. ‘I Don’t Care as Long as He’s Happy’: Dispatches from the Parenting Happiness Rat Race
5. God’s Plan of Happiness
6. I’m Not a Happy Person, I Just Play One on Facebook
7. Positive Psychology (or, If You’re Not Happy, It’s Your Own Fault, You Lazy Schmuck)
8. Star-Spangled Happy
Acknowledgements
Notes
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781473519602
Version 1.0
Published by Hutchinson 2016
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Ruth Whippman, 2016
Ruth Whippman has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Hutchinson
Hutchinson
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Hutchinson is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780091959159 (trade paperback)
For Neil.
And for Solly and Zephy. With love.
I’m at the gynaecologist for my smear test, feet in stirrups, idly wondering what the etiquette experts might suggest as appropriate small talk for those moments when the person you are speaking to will be replying to your vagina. We’ve been living in America for a few months now, having moved here from London for my husband’s job, and in theory, Britishness should be good preparation for these kinds of occasions. After all, our national social speciality is the denial of glaring intimacies, soldiering on with weather pleasantries to avoid acknowledging any form of nudity, either physical or emotional.
Unfortunately, even at the best of times, making casual conversation with a British accent in America feels a bit like being a librarian in a nightclub, or wearing a set of iron tongue calipers. Now we’re living here, I’m doomed to lug this paralysing verbal awkwardness around with me for the next few years until we move back to England and I can stop attempting to sound convincing saying words like ‘awesome!’ and ‘good job!’ and ‘ass’. (This last genuinely technically impossible to pronounce with a British tongue without sounding utterly ludicrous or as though you’re talking about a donkey.)
This time, however, I needn’t have worried – the doctor is doing all the talking. Delving deep with her speculum, she delves deeper into matters of the heart, recounting tales from her own personal happiness journey. Apparently she is reading Gretchen Rubin’s bestseller Happier at Home and finding it very instructive. I’ve read that book too and am suddenly overcome with crippling self-consciousness. I hope desperately that my gynaecologist is not currently reading the part about how, in order to achieve true happiness, it is advisable to give total mental focus to how everything around you smells.
Six months ago I would have found it hard to believe that I would be discussing the path to everlasting bliss with the gynaecologist, but after a stint living in California, it feels almost routine. Since arriving here, I feel as though I have had more conversations about my own and other people’s happiness than in the whole of the rest of my life put together.
We moved to the States from the UK when my techy husband, Neil, was offered a job with a software start-up in Silicon Valley. A committed America-phile, he jumped at the chance, and I quit my frenetic job making television documentaries to be a stay-at-home mum to our toddler son Solly. Although I got a fair amount of mileage from the clear moral advantage of being the one who ‘gave up everything for her loved one’s dreams’, in reality I was ready to ditch my lifelong codependent relationship with surly grey London and embrace the sun-drenched beauty of California.
But a few months in, I’m feeling displaced and lonely. I have gone from being desperate to spend more time with Solly to having vast unbroken vistas of togetherness that are sending me slightly crazy. He is, of course, the very delight of my soul, but he only knows ten words and five of those are names for different types of construction vehicle. Desperate for adult conversation, I am sidling up to anyone and everyone – mums pushing swings next to me in the playground, the dry cleaner, the man in front of me in the queue at the supermarket, and a range of random local contacts scratched together for me by friends back in London. Oddly, the same topic comes up time and time again: happiness.
The conversations tend to fall into two broad categories: the agonising kind and the evangelical kind. As a compulsive overthinker myself, the agonising ones feel more familiar to me. These conversations are all about questions. Am I with the right person? Am I following my passions? Am I doing what I love? What is my purpose in life? Am I as happy as I should be?
As a Brit raised on a diet of armchair cynicism, the evangelical-style conversations are newer territory. In these, people claim to have found the answers. They enthuse about their chosen paths to bliss, convinced, at least temporarily, that they have found the definitive thing that will pin down the happy-ever-after.
Their answers range from the mundane to the mind-boggling. Yoga and meditation. Keeping a ‘gratitude journal’. A weekend seminar on how to ‘Unleash the Power Within’. Keeping your baby attached to your body for a minimum of twenty-two hours out of every twenty-four. And, most bafflingly – not least on a practical level – the drinking of wolf colostrum. A friend of a friend who I meet for coffee livens up a rather dull conversation about what time her husband gets home from work with the observation that it really doesn’t matter one way or the other, as the most important person in her life is actually Jesus.
It seems as though happiness in America has become the overachiever’s ultimate trophy. A modern trump card, it outranks professional achievement and social success, family, friendship and even love. Its invocation deftly minimises others’ achievements (‘Well, I suppose she has the perfect job and a gorgeous husband, but is she really happy?’) and takes the shine off our own.
It all feels a long way from the approach that I was brought up with. Thomas Jefferson knew what he was doing when he wrote that ‘pursuit of happiness’ line in the US Declaration of Independence, a perfectly delivered slap in the face to his joy-shunning oppressors across the pond. Emotionally awkward and primed for scepticism, the British are generally uncomfortable around the subject and, as a rule, don’t subscribe to the happy-ever-after. It’s not that we don’t want to be happy. It just feels embarrassing to discuss it, and demeaning to chase it, like calling someone moments after a first date to ask them if they like you.
Self-help books and yoga classes and meditation all exist in the UK, of course – there is no shortage of people willing to take your money in return for the promise of bliss, but they somehow don’t have the same magnetic pull, our inbuilt cultural scepticism providing a natural check.
Part of it is that Americans seem to have a deep cultural aversion to negativity. This can be a welcome change, but the pressure to remain positive at all times often results in some complicated mental gymnastics. My son’s report card from nursery divided his performance into not ‘strengths and weaknesses’ but ‘strengths’ and ‘emerging strengths’. American problems are routinely rebranded as ‘opportunities’, hence the filthy toilets in our local supermarket display a sign saying: ‘If this restroom fails to meet your expectations, please inform us of the opportunity’, as if reeking puddles of urine are merely an inspirational occasion for personal growth.
Cynicism is the British shtick, our kneejerk starting point. I think back to a time a few years ago when I was working at the BBC in London, and our managers booked a motivational trainer to come and attempt to gee up the dispirited employees in my department. The trainer identified the problem: we were all far too negative, and would be much happier and better motivated if we would just stop saying ‘no’ all the time. He suggested that next time someone put forward an idea, instead of responding with the words ‘No, but …’ (insert mean-spirited objection to other person’s creativity) we should force ourselves to respond with a ‘Yes, and …’ (insert positive-spirited, constructive comment building on other person’s idea). He made us try it out, kicking things off himself with an initial sample idea, then throwing it over to the next person in line to pick up. ‘Yes, and … that’s bollocks,’ said the next person. This pretty much sums up the British attitude.
It feels good to be away from this sometimes life-leeching negativity; but I also find it hard to throw myself full-tilt into the American approach to hunting down bliss. Happiness over here has its own vocabulary: ‘mindfulness’, ‘empowerment’. Whenever I hear the word ‘empowerment’, it always makes me feel slightly edgy, as if at any moment I might be asked to take my clothes off. If someone suggests that a given activity is going to be ‘empowering’, I know that it’s almost certainly going to be undignified, mildly humiliating or involve heights. As a rule, ‘empowerment’ appears to be the consolation prize for those of us who will never have any actual power, and you can safely assume that no one in any position of genuine authority will be joining in. Creating a Tumblr of photos of your post-caesarian wobbling and scarred naked stomach? Empowering! Creating a Tumblr of photos of your post-prostate-surgery rectum? Not so much, Your Honour.
Mindfulness is everywhere, the hugely popular zeitgeist theory that in order to be happy we must live fully in the present moment, with total mental focus on whatever we are doing or experiencing Right This Second. Time magazine publishes an eight-page front cover spread entitled ‘The Mindful Revolution’ that opens with the author, an impressive and decorated journalist, bringing the full force of her considerable mental capacity to bear on a raisin. The raisin ‘glistens’. I can’t help thinking that, as a rule, food shouldn’t glisten.
During my first few months in America, I come across mindful parenting, mindful business dealings, mindful eating and even mindful dishwashing, complete with a detailed set of instructions on the Huffington Post, in printable format, to pin above the sink. According to the practice’s thought-leaders, in order to achieve maximum happiness the mindful dishwasher must refuse to succumb to domestic autopilot, and instead fully mentally engage with every piece of congealed scrambled egg and glued-on spaghetti hoop.
I find mindfulness a hard theory to embrace. Surely one of the most magnificent things about the human brain is its ability to hold past, present, future and their imagined alternatives in constant parallel, to offset the tedium of washing dishes in Milton Keynes with the chance to be simultaneously mentally in Bangkok, or in Don Draper’s boxer shorts, or finally telling your mother-in-law that despite her belief that ‘no one born in the seventies died’, using a car seat isn’t spoiling your child. I struggle to see how greater happiness could be achieved by reining in that magical sense of scope and possibility to stare out a raisin.
Although I’m probably just being defensive. As a person who is ridiculously distractible, to me the whole philosophy of mindfulness comes across almost as a personal attack, an intervention from some well-meaning body to compel me to stop doing the ‘Which Brunch Menu Item Are You?’ BuzzFeed quiz and go read Llama, Llama, I’m a Self-Harmer to my son for the nineteenth time this morning. (Anyhow, I’m convinced the idea that distraction is a product of the modern age and that our foremothers spent their days in a state of total mindful focus on their children is a myth. The desperate urge to escape the more grinding realities of childcare was surely just as strong for our mothers’ generation; they just used Valium instead of iPhones.)
I start to wonder whether the high-octane approach to the pursuit of happiness that I’m seeing here in middle-class California is in any way representative of American culture more widely. California has always been the headquarters of the Great National Search for Happiness, and the people I am meeting, although generally not rich or part of any kind of mega-elite, do tend to be university-educated professionals, a similar bracket to me and most of my social network back home. Is all this joy-hunting just the ultimate luxury for a privileged bunch of high-income Californians?
A bit of digging suggests not. Although the poverty-stricken are unlikely to be browsing through Amazon for a book about mindfulness, a little research reveals that the explicit and focused quest for happiness as a goal distinct from the rest of life is seeping through virtually all sections of American society. Oprah Winfrey, the reigning queen of the happy-seekers, is widely considered to be one of the most influential people in America, having brought her signature brand of self-improvement and spirituality to hundreds of millions of Americans. Yet around half of Oprah’s TV audience had a household income of less than $50,000, the US median, and around the same proportion had no education beyond high school.1
Mindfulness is seeping into the education system throughout the nation. In Ohio, Congressman Tim Ryan, author of the book A Mindful Nation, in which he argued that ‘happiness is found by deeply experiencing the exact moment we are in’, recently received a sizeable federal grant to bring mindfulness classes into the state’s elementary schools2 (although at least one school discontinued the programme after parents complained that they were ‘taking valuable time out of education to put kids in a room of darkness to lay on their backs’3). Americans buy around a billion dollars’ worth of self-help books and audiobooks each year.4 Meanwhile the Internet bursts with links to motivational happiness seminars all across the country aimed at the unemployed, rebranding destitution as an exciting opportunity for personal development.
As the perfect blend of the pioneer spirit and the perky one, the Great Search for Happiness is a characteristically American struggle, a ‘wagons-west’ of the soul. This is the emotional face of the American Dream and the faith in meritocracy that underpins it. The belief that if you put in enough emotional elbow grease, if you slog out the hours in yoga classes and mindfulness seminars, parachute jumps and self-help books and megachurches and therapy sessions, then eternal happiness will be yours. It’s an inspiring promise, but for something that’s supposed to be pleasurable, it can also feel like an awful lot of hard work.
It occurs to me that all these happiness pursuits often don’t seem to be making people particularly happy. When a new American friend persuades me to try out a yoga class, you can almost smell the tension and misery in the room. Although it’s a little hard to determine cause and effect, as anyone who was already feeling happy would be unlikely to waste the sensation in a fetid room at the gym, contorting their body into uncomfortable positions. The happy person would more likely be off doing something fun, like sitting in the park, drinking.
Before moving to America, I didn’t really give a whole lot of dedicated thought to whether or not I was happy. Like most people, in any given day I will experience emotions and sensations including (but not limited to): hilarity, joy, irritation, ambivalence, excitement, embarrassment, paralysing self-doubt, boredom, anxiety, guilt, heart-stopping love, resentment, pride, exhaustion and the shrill, insistent buzz of uneaten chocolate somewhere in the house. It’s hard to pin one definitive label on to all this clattering emotional noise, but I’m confident that if you add them all up, and divide by the number of emotions (or whatever other formula they use to calculate the statistics in all the research studies on happiness that I start to notice in the press), then you reach an average falling squarely into the box marked ‘contentment’.
But the more conversations I have about happiness, and the more I absorb the idea that there’s a glittering happy-ever-after out there for the taking, the more I start to overthink the whole thing, compulsively monitoring how I am feeling and hyper-parenting my emotions. Am I happy? Right at this moment? What about now? And now? Am I happy enough? As happy as everyone else? What about Meghan? Is she happier than me? She looks happier. What is she doing that I’m not doing? Maybe I should take up yoga. The whole process starts to become painfully, comically neurotic. Workaday contentment starts to give way to a low-grade sense of inadequacy when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been reached: a recipe for anxiety.
As an outsider, it can sometimes feel as though the entire population has a nationwide standardised happiness exam to sit, and everyone is frantically cramming the night before to get a good grade. Like a stony-faced ‘That’s hilarious’ after a joke in place of laughter – another mildly unnerving staple of conversation in the US – it appears that somewhere along the line, the joy has been sucked out of American happiness.
Oddly, even adjusting for emotional openness, my new happiness-seeking American acquaintances seem no happier, and often more anxious than my cynical joy-slacking British ones. My instinct is that this is because happiness should be serendipitous, the by-product of a life well lived, and chasing it in a vacuum just doesn’t really work. I want to dig a little deeper and find out whether or not this hunch stands up to scrutiny.
After some initial research, I find a couple of somewhat surprising studies by psychologists from the University of California, Berkeley. In the first, participants were given a questionnaire and asked to rate how highly they valued happiness as an explicit goal, and also how happy they were with their lives.
Surprisingly, the higher the respondents rated happiness as a distinct personal ambition, the less happy they were in their lives generally and the more likely they were to experience symptoms of dissatisfaction and even depression.5
This in itself doesn’t prove cause and effect – after all, it makes sense that people who are unhappy would be likely to value happiness more highly, so the researchers designed another experiment to determine which way the effect was going.
This time, they gave one group of people an article to read about the importance of happiness, and then afterwards showed them a happy film. A second group of participants were shown the same film but without reading the article first. The group that had read the happiness article reported feeling less happiness from watching the happy film than the group who watched without reading first. The authors of these studies concluded that, paradoxically, the more people valued and were encouraged to value happiness as a separate life goal, the less happy they were.
Like an attractive man, it seems the more actively happiness is pursued, the more it refuses to call and starts avoiding you at parties.
Americans as a whole invest more time and money and emotional energy in the explicit pursuit of happiness than any other nation on earth, but is all this effort and investment paying off? Is America getting happier and happier? Are Americans more content than people in other countries? Should the UK be following their lead?
The answer appears to be a pretty clear no. Somehow, this great nation that included the pursuit of happiness so prominently in its founding principles has been shown by various international comparison studies to be one of the less happy places in the developed world. Although these studies are not without their problems, with different methodologies producing different results, Gallup’s 2014 ‘Positive Experience Index’, an international comparison study of the moment to moment happiness of people living in various nations, ranked America at an underwhelming twenty-fifth in the world, two places behind Rwanda.6
For all the effort that Americans are putting into hunting down happiness, they are not actually getting any happier. According to the General Social Survey, a large-scale project that has been tracking trends in American life since the early seventies, there has been almost no change in American happiness levels since 1972 when records began. Every year, with remarkable consistency, around 30 per cent of Americans report that they are ‘very happy’. It’s a fair chunk, but a figure that remains surprisingly constant, untouched by mindfulness or megachurches, by yoga or meditation or Gretchen Rubin or attachment parenting.
According to the World Health Organization, as well as being one of the less happy developed countries in the world, the United States is, by a wide margin, also officially the most anxious, with nearly one third of Americans likely to suffer from an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.7 A 2012 report by the American Psychological Association warned that the nation was ‘on the verge of a stress induced public health crisis’.8
There are many reasons why life in America is likely to produce anxiety compared to other developed nations: long working hours without paid holidays for many, insecure employment conditions with little legal protection for workers, inequality, and the lack of universal healthcare coverage, to name a few. The happiness-seeking culture is clearly supposed to be part of the solution, but perhaps it is actually part of the problem. Maybe America’s precocious levels of anxiety are happening not just in spite of the great national happiness rat race, but also in part because of it.
I become full of questions. What is causing this strange paradox? Has something gone wrong with the way in which Americans are pursuing happiness? Or is the hunt for happiness counterproductive and damaging in and of itself? Am I just a mean-spirited enemy of joy, or is a bit of British-style scepticism not such a bad thing? What really makes people happy in life? And most importantly, is there a more effective, less self-involved and less stressful way to find happiness? If so, what is it?
To get some answers, I decide to investigate the great American happiness rat race in all its many forms. I’ve been a journalist for most of my career, both in television and in print, so I have the background to research, but my curiosity is just as much personal. I will look more closely at my own life and the lives of the people I know. I will sample some of the bliss-promising offerings and find out what the research really says about this great national obsession. What is it that really makes us happy? What doesn’t? All being well, we will be living in the United States for a good few years. During this time, I will make it my mission to work out just what is going on here.
Is it possible to hunt down a happy life, or is the Great Search for Happiness creating a nation of nervous wrecks?
There should be a government information campaign, like the anti-drink-driving ones. Don’t Drink and Update. It’s 10 p.m., the bottle of wine next to me has a well-used look about it, and I’m recklessly updating my Facebook status. It’s back in the odd, brief era when we were all using that stilted, slightly self-important third-person format on Facebook. ‘Britney Jones loves her kids’; ‘Brian Smith is eating a sandwich’, as though we were drafting our own Wikipedia entries or live-blogging our obituaries. You could always tell the grammar pedants because they kept the third-person thing going for the second sentence. ‘And she loves her hot man too …’ ‘But he’s removed the ham from it …’
This time, though, the format is perfect for what I’m about to write, helping me pretend that I’m not actually referring to myself at all, and that rather than being about to make a full-frontal public declaration of loserdom, I’m merely raising awareness of a good cause, even engaging in an act of philanthropy. ‘Ruth Whippman …’ goads Facebook’s prompt. I type: ‘has no friends. Can anyone help her find some?’
Our first few months in the States have been tough. In as much as I had given it any real thought, my vision of how life in California would be was sketchily drawn from a mixture of Hollywood, Baywatch and paradise. Over-focusing on beaches and weather, I hadn’t really considered what it would feel like to be living without any of the usual scaffolding of my life at home – my job, and especially my family and friends.
For all this talk of American happiness, the truth is I’m not very happy myself, which is compounded by feeling guilty about this unwarranted lack of bliss. The upside of first-world problems is obviously that they are first-world problems, rather than, say, Ebola or starvation. The downside is that they condemn you to a life lived to the sound of a looping mental soundtrack of your own subconscious jeering ‘First-world problems!’ on endless repeat and thereby invalidating your every emotion. But despite being in the world headquarters of self-actualisation, my general state is a kind of sluggish loneliness, a lack of belonging that eats away at my days.
This isn’t helped by the fact that if the many happiness articles and advice blogs I’m reading are to be believed, I’m missing out on a supersized, star-spangled brand of happiness available only in America, like some kind of four-animal McDonald’s menu item, sold only in select outlets in Texas. The overriding message is that I should be dragging myself out of this slump and seizing it with both hands. The whole thing is making me feel like a bit of a failure.
It’s hard not to get sucked in. I’ve caught myself scanning the Huffington Post’s ‘GPS for the Soul’ pages before reading the news section in the morning. My Google searches have slowly shifted from my usual ‘am I dying?’/‘is this cancer?’/‘is my child meeting milestones that I only knew existed through previous unhealthy googling?’ towards ‘how to be happy’. Google (and presumably the National Security Agency) quickly pegs me as a happiness-seeker, popping up spooky personalised ads whenever I log on urging me to sign up for ‘daily inspirational content delivered direct to your inbox’.
The ‘inspirational content’ tends to offer up a vision of the happy-ever-after somewhere between ashram and Barbie Dream House. ‘How To Get Everything You Want!’ promises the subject heading of one email. I assume this is going to be the kind of wisdom-gimmick that will tell me how to get Everything I Want simply by realising that what I want is, by magical coincidence, exactly what I already have! or by adjusting what I want away from ‘a lottery win and a night with Ryan Gosling’ towards ‘truly knowing the love of Jesus’. But no, a click reveals it to be a straightforward, moral-twist-free guide to getting Everything I Want, whether a pony, a castle, a signed photo of the Dalai Lama or a one-way ticket to Everlasting Joy.
Secretly, though, I prefer this high-end happiness fantasy to the uncharacteristically depressing pair of advice emails that land in my inbox a few days later that make me paranoid that Google’s marketing algorithm has decided I’m beyond hope. They read:
But none of the advice is really taking the edge off the basic feeling that I don’t quite belong here. In primary school, while never quite the least popular person in the class, with my NHS glasses and Saturday mornings spent at junior orchestra I was certainly in the remainder bin, usually around two weird kids away from total social isolation. This experience brings it back.
So I’m thrilled when my Facebook plea pays off. A couple of days after my post, a friend from London emails me to say that her old university flatmate is from the area, lives just round the corner, and is also the mother of a toddler boy. She introduces us over email and sets us up on a ‘friend blind date’. After a few messages back and forth, Allison and I arrange to meet one morning with the kids in our local park.
I like Allison immediately. Fizzing with energy, she is smart and funny, in that warm American way of engaging first and judging later, rather than the British way that generally means only getting on board when all options for cynicism are fully exhausted, and then only with a kind of grudging, embarrassed irony. She instantly dispenses with small talk, and we get stuck straight into a long rangy conversation that covers everything from potty training to the meaning of life.
Having given up the promise of a high-powered career to raise son Jayden, and feeling underwhelmed with the day-to-day reality of toddler-herding, Allison is on a mission to find happiness. She isn’t unhappy as such but, being a lifelong overachiever, thinks she can do better.
She does yoga and meditation. She sees a therapist weekly. (She tells me that she once couldn’t talk to her sister for two weeks because both of their therapists were on holiday and the relationship couldn’t withstand unmediated socialising.) She practises mindfulness and reads Gretchen Rubin and is a devotee of a German self-help guru called Eckhart Tolle. I am embarrassed never to have heard of Eckhart Tolle and surreptitiously google him on my phone while Allison is in the bathroom. A quick search turns up a beige-clad, gnome-like mysticist offering brain-scrambling insights such as: ‘The secret of life is to “die before you die” – and find that there is no death.’ It all feels a bit like being trapped in a lift with a mystical self-help version of the Microsoft Word paperclip. ‘It looks like you’re writing a letter. Can I help?’ or in Tolle’s case: ‘It looks like you’re struggling to transcend your ego-based state of consciousness. Can I offer you some verbose pseudo-Buddhism?’
Although we are poles apart on many subjects, I really like Allison. She’s good fun and I admire her intelligence and good-natured willingness to tolerate my cynicism. I enjoy talking to her and she tells me she feels the same way. We agree we must meet up more often.
It is later that I realise Allison is very, very hard to get hold of. She is almost always busy. We text back and forth a few times, trying to arrange another meeting, but it never quite pans out. During her relatively rare free time, she is usually at yoga, or meditating, or on a retreat or at a workshop, or blogging about her experiences. It makes me feel exhausted just hearing about it all. As she tells me regretfully, ‘I hardly have time to see anyone at the moment.’ Apparently Allison is so busy trying to be happy, friendship has gone to the bottom of the list.
It may well have been just an elaborate ruse to avoid me, and frankly who could blame her given my current state of toxic neediness, but Allison’s approach to finding happiness feels a bit back to front. After all, isn’t spending time with friends and other people exactly what makes life happy?
But the more mainstream self-help-type advice I read, the more I start to notice just how much of it pitches finding happiness as a personal journey, that is best pursued alone.
‘Happiness comes from within’, declare a thousand blogs and articles, positive psychology books and Facebook memes. Variations include: ‘Happiness comes from within not from others’; ‘Happiness is determined not by what’s happening around you, but what’s happening inside you’; ‘Happiness should not depend on other people’; and the perky and social-media-friendly ‘Happiness is an Inside Job’. One email I receive, advertising a new local yoga studio, even doubles down on the idea with the turbocharged word mash-up ‘with-inwards’. (Although when I first see the subject heading ‘Go Withinwards’, I briefly think it’s a review for a new nose-to-tail offal restaurant.)
I see what they’re all getting at, I think. But after a while, the whole philosophy starts to sound like a strange kind of emotional isolationism.
‘When you stray from the idea that happiness is inside of you, you start turning to people and things to make you happy,’ writes one prominent psychologist on Oprah.com, a site that devotes large chunks of space to the pursuit of happiness and the idea that we must dig deep into our own souls to find it. His tone is disparaging enough to suggest that he could just as well substitute the words ‘people’ and ‘things’ with ‘child pornography’ and ‘human trafficking’. ‘Following your joy should be an internal activity,’ he concludes firmly, although provides no real explanation as to why.
This conviction that happiness cannot be found via other people or the outside world has trickled down to become so basic and uncontroversial that it even forms the basis for an article on the ‘For Dummies’ website, the series which has made its name taking complex subjects and stripping them down to their universally accepted bare essentials. Entitled ‘The Four Happiness Myths’, the piece says definitively: ‘Just as money can’t make you happy, other people can’t make you happy either.’
Given my own current social isolation, the revelation that other people can’t make me happy, and that I should be pursuing happiness within and alone, feels odd. As an experiment, I try a Google image search for ‘Inspirational Meme: “Happiness is other people” ’. Here is what shows up:
‘Hell is other people.’
‘If Happiness depends on other people, you’re gonna have a bad time.’
‘Fuck you and your happiness.’
And most perplexingly, a picture of Hitler and another, unidentified Nazi guffawing at a shared private joke with the caption: ‘Life is about doing the things that make you happy, not the things that please other people.’ I’m not entirely sure what the inspirational take-home from this is supposed to be. Genocide?
Whether consciously or not, people are clearly buying into the idea that happiness should not be sought through other people.
Increasingly, Americans are chasing happiness by looking inwards to their own souls, rather than outwards to their friends and communities. Nearly half of all meals in America are now eaten alone.1 The average American has fewer close friends than he or she did twenty years ago.2 According to the General Social Survey, in 1974 nearly half of people had socialised with their neighbours in the last month. By 2008 it was less than one third, and that figure has declined every year since.3
In another factoid that I secretly find oddly validating, helping to keep a lid on my nagging, school-playground-inspired paranoia that everyone else is always at a Fantastic Party that I haven’t been invited to, the American Time Use Survey shows that the average American now spends less than four minutes a day ‘hosting or attending social events’, a category that covers all types of organised hosted social occasions apart from the most spur-of-the-moment informal.4 Four minutes? Added up over a year that barely covers Christmas, Thanksgiving and your own kids’ birthday parties.
Perhaps even more surprisingly, the same survey shows that people in the US spend just thirty-six minutes a day doing any kind of ‘socialising and communicating’ at all where this is their main activity and not an incidental part of something else like working. This is in comparison to three hours watching television and even, for women, an hour ‘grooming’.
The figure sounds so low that I call the Time Use Survey’s helpline just to check what it includes (feeling mildly relieved as I do so that no one is surveying my own time use). As it turns out, not only is the thirty-six-minute figure correct, it also doesn’t just cover the good kind of socialising and communicating, but any form of communication at all where more than one adult is present, including arguing, nagging, bitching and trying to convince your husband that For the Love of God, Being Born with a Y Chromosome Should Not Mean a Biological Inability to Search Inside a Fridge.
But at the same time that socialising has taken a nosedive, there has been an explosion in the uptake of solitary ‘happiness pursuits’, activities that are carried out either completely alone, or in a group without interaction, with the explicit aim that each person stays locked in their own private emotional experience.
Meditation has seen a dramatic breakthrough in the last few years, with around 20 million people across the country now regularly meditating.5 Time magazine reports that Americans spend around $4 billion a year on ‘mindfulness products’.6 Yoga has seen a similarly spectacular ascension, with the country now spending $10 billion a year on yoga classes and accessories,7 making it the fourth-fastest-growing industry in America.8 These figures are significant enough that savvy marketers have even designated a whole new category they are calling ‘spiritual spending’.
The self-help industry, with its guiding principle that the search for happiness should be an individual, self-focused enterprise, is also booming, with Americans now buying approximately a billion dollars-worth of self-help books and audiobooks a year9 to help guide them on their inner journeys.fn1
And in what sounds like an extended metaphor from a mid-list 1970s sci-fi novel, in which all human emotions are contracted out to soul-sucking personal microcomputers, there are now close to a thousand different options in the App Store for smartphone apps to help us locate happiness deep within our mobiles.
I think I’m probably not the target market for these happiness apps. I assume the makers are pitching them more at some kind of superstressed Ayn Randian tech billionaire firing off abusive emails from his yacht, or the mythical mean ‘career mum’ from the magazines prising the wailing infant from her leg so she can hotfoot it to her arena of corporate cruelty. (Although my baby does cling to my leg and wail when I selfishly attempt to ‘have it all’ – both a child and a pee.)
But in one of my lonelier moments, when my husband sets off for work one morning leaving me with a gaping ten hours before my next adult conversation, I attempt to fill the void with a spot of happiness retail therapy in the App Store.
Some of the options are mind-bogglingly complex, using inbuilt sensors in the phone to measure my happiness levels and then, if they are found wanting, attempting to correct the problem by showing me a range of sub-Upworthy-style Internet memes (‘Chivalrous Goat Tries To Save His Friend!’, ‘This Draping Wisteria Will Leave You Dazzled!’) plus photo montages of sunsets, beaches, cute puppies and my own family. (It doesn’t occur to me until later that spending the time with my actual family rather than staring at my phone might bring me more happiness.)
In the end I opt for a lower-tech offering, a positive-thinking app called Positive. I obviously need it. My hardwired negativity means that my instant mental association with the word ‘positive’ is not ‘affirmations’ but ‘HIV’.
Positive texts me every few hours with an inspirational statement that I am supposed to repeat over and over to myself until I start to believe it. The problem is, whenever my phone buzzes I get a Pavlovian jolt of excitement, thinking that it’s a message from an actual person. The crushing disappointment I feel when I realise that it is only Positive, urging me to chant the phrase ‘I am enough’ until bliss descends, slightly spoils the effect. ‘I am enough,’ I snarl, sarcastically tacking on a muttered ‘which is lucky, because I haven’t spoken to another adult apart from my husband in the last nineteen days.’
Perhaps the clearest example of the trend for the solitary pursuit of happiness is the recent stratospheric rise in popularity of meditation and its secular sidekick, mindfulness.
In his New York Times bestseller Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, one of an influx of recent books on the topic, ‘contemporary philosopher’ Sam Harris writes:
Is there a happiness that does not depend on having one’s favorite foods available, or friends and loved ones within arm’s reach, or good books to read, or something to look forward to on the weekend? … I can attest that when one goes into silence and meditates for weeks or months at a time, doing nothing else, not speaking, reading or writing – just making a moment to moment effort to observe the contents of consciousness – one has experiences that are generally unavailable to people who have not undertaken a similar practice. I believe that such states of mind have a lot to say about the possibilities of human well-being.
A few years back, when meditation practised anywhere outside of Tibet or adolescence still had the vague whiff of patchouli and dysfunction about it, it would have been hard to believe that Harris’s words were being addressed to a mainstream audience.
But now the idea of seeking out solitary confinement to explore your inner consciousness is firmly at the heart of the establishment. Meditation’s cheerleaders now include known radicals like the US Marine Corps, Deutsche Bank, and McKinsey & Company (whose spokesperson explained to the Wall Street Journal, ‘what’s good for the spirit is good for the bottom line’). Google runs a wildly popular seven-week mindfulness and meditation course for its workforce called ‘Search Inside Yourself’ (unironic curriculum description: ‘Success, Happiness and World Peace’).
In his number-one New York Times bestselling meditation memoir 10% Happier, ABC news anchor Dan Harris chronicles his journey from cynic to committed meditator who goes on lengthy silent meditation retreats where even eye contact with other participants is discouraged. He credits the practice of meditation with a 10 per cent increase in his overall happiness. (Although in the book’s acknowledgements section, Harris thanks his wife, Bianca, for ‘making me 100% happier before I was 10% happier’, which begs the question as to whether he might see a ten-times-higher happiness return from spending his annual leave allocation with her instead.)
Meanwhile, for those who baulk at meditation’s quasi-religious overtones, but still see happiness as something best pursued inside our own heads, there has also been the parallel rise of the secular ‘mindfulness’.
The Moment is having a moment.