Action for Happiness focuses on the portion of happiness deemed to be within an individual’s control
Last month saw the launch of Action for Happiness, a movement dedicated to “creating a happier society for everybody”. Based on the pop-song-friendly premise that the best things in life are free, it aims to make everybody happy in non-material ways. Good deeds, relationships and community ties are in; anything you can buy on Amazon is out.
The movement is part of a wider societal drive towards the promotion of wellbeing, independent of wealth. David Cameron’s happiness index – an attempt by the Office of National Statistics to quantify the nation’s joie de vivre – was announced in November, and the project itself is a classic ‘Big Society’ manoeuvre. As one of the founders commented at the launch, Action for Happiness is designed to dam “the rising tide of excessive individualism” as well as cheering us all up.
It is easy to be cynical about the political objectives here – in today’s financially straitened times, might an ‘improvement in wellbeing’ be used as a stand-in for the more tangible promise of economic recovery? But even with the assumption of good faith on the government’s part, some difficult questions remain. Is it useful to be shooting for ‘happiness’ per se? Or might it too easily mutate into the sort of blind optimism which stands in the way of social change?
The movement, which is backed by a team of social scientists including Lord Richard Layard, has its roots in ‘positive psychology’. Positive psychology in the sense that people have been always been consumed by the quest for happiness is not new. As a discrete movement however it is very much a child of our times. It is not so much interested in treating mental illness as it is in promoting mental health.
While positive psychology has been enormously influential, spawning a plethora of happiness-related tomes, it has not been without its detractors. Most notably, Barbara Ehrenreich last year published Smile or Die – an abrasive look at the cult of positive thinking which reframed the ‘don’t worry be happy’ mantra as a potentially disastrous delusion.
Ehrenreich, who suffered from cancer, was aghast to find that ‘positive thinking’ was largely deemed essential for recovery. This spurious piece of science had infiltrated an entire culture’s perception of the disease. And moving beyond cancer recovery forums, she found such rose-tinted delusiveness was endemic. From economic meltdown to mega-churches to motivational self-help books, society as she sees it would benefit from less emphasis on what feels good, rather than from more.
Ehrenreich’s target is the USA, and when it comes to our own nation of cynics, optimism is less constitutionally ingrained. That said, the relentless plugging of ‘happiness’ on our shores may suggest that we’re en route to catching up.
Action for Happiness is undoubtedly well-intentioned, and it is based on some solid research. ‘Take a positive approach’, ‘have goals to look forward to’: the evidence indicates that such things do indeed make people happier. Moreover, as it is encouraging its supporters to set up groups in their communities, the project rests on more than mere buzzwords.
Still, we might question the implications of marketing social action as a matter of naked self-interest. Might ‘happiness’ supply a warm and fuzzy façade behind which the real problems lurk? When it comes to addressing social problems, many of which are grounded predominantly in economic inequalities, it does not seem that ‘happiness’ is self-evidently the most desirable goal.
Image from Tesseract2 and IMs BILDARKIV
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