The happiness conspiracy: How the need to feel good is making us miserable

Thomas Jefferson made it a constitutional right in the US. “The pursuit of happiness.” You have the right to pursue wellbeing. No one is stopping you. Go ahead and pursue it. But when did a right morph into an obligation, a duty?

The founding fathers were influenced by the great voyages of discovery. Thanks to Captain Cook and his French counterpart Bougainville, the idea got about that everyone in the southern hemisphere was happier than in the cold and dismal north. We had the technology, we had the “civilisation”, but why didn’t we feel good about it? They had something we were lacking. Surfing was a case in point. According to European observers, the men and women riding waves had found a way to “allay all perturbation of mind”. The American constitution was, in effect, suggesting we ought to try living our lives on the crest of a wave.

The utopian project took off in the 19th century. America became the mecca of the heaven-on-earth brigade. We had the feeling that there were a lucky few that were having a high old time – why not the rest of us? Sigmund Freud was the first to say flat out, in his contrary way, that you’re wasting your time pursuing happiness. In Civilisation and its Discontents he argued that the “pleasure principle” was always going to run up against the “reality principle”. Reality doesn’t want you to be happy. Pain and punishment will always tend to outweigh pleasure. “The program [of the pleasure principle] is at loggerheads with the whole world … and cannot be fulfilled”. He denounced what he called “the oceanic feeling”, the transient impression of being connected to others and the wider world, as a delusion. He blamed Captain Cook, religion, and (honestly enough) psychoanalysis itself for making people think they could ever transcend the normal state of being miserable.

I personally put the utopian theory to the test by following in Cook’s footsteps and going to the Sandwich Islands, aka Hawaii, aka “the Happy Isles of Oceania” (according to Paul Theroux). By a strange quirk of fate one of the first people I met there was a clinical psychologist. “Where are you from?”, she said. “England,” I replied. “You’re so lucky!” she said. I had just travelled several thousand miles to get away from England and here was someone telling me I was better off saving my money and staying put. “How do you work that out?” I asked. “The great thing about England,” she replied, “is that you can be miserable and nobody minds. In fact you’re expected to be miserable.”

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It turned out that she was a specialist in treating people with depression. “In Hawaii?” I said with genuine scepticism. They have palm trees, sultry breezes, and big waves, what was the problem? “People get depressed in Hawaii the same as anywhere else,” she said. “The problem is that here you’re expected to be happy. So you feel guilty about it on top. And then considering Hawaii is also technically the 50th state of America, if you’re broke too, when you’re supposed to be prosperous, then you’re really screwed.”

Dr Depression surely had a point. But she represents the opposition to what has become increasingly a vast and powerful and highly profitable industry, as Carl Cederström sets out in his wise and witty new book, The Happiness Fantasy. He might equally well have called it the “happiness conspiracy”, because we are being ganged up on, bullied and battered and bruised by the imperative of happiness. Can’t we just be unhappy if we feel like it? What’s so bad about that?

I know I’m going to come over as the biggest party pooper, grouch or grinch in the history of the world here, but I can never really sing “Happy Birthday” to anyone with any degree of conviction or enthusiasm. I do still occasionally send birthday cards, but I’m not going to write the words “happy birthday” in black and white. It always seems too coercive to me. My attitude is OK, be happy if you like, but if you want to be unhappy that’s good too, you shouldn’t have to feel like you have to be happy. Happiness ought to be voluntary and accidental and spontaneous and strictly optional. (So what do I write? “Be awesome”? It’s tricky. Suggestions on a postcard, please.)

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Cederström comes from Stockholm. He is more of an exponent of Nordic noir. No palm trees in Scandi-land, so far as I know. Only bracing, even lacerating minimalism. Don’t get me wrong. Cederström is not advocating despair. Maybe he is even trying to save you from Hawaiian-style depression. You don’t have to be miserable, but it’s your constitutional right to be downhearted if you want to be. What he demonstrates so convincingly is how feeling good can really be bad for you.

According to Philip Larkin, sex was invented – or at least re-invented – sometime between the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Beatles’ first LP, around 1963. “Happiness,” as Freud said, “comes from the satisfaction of needs that have been dammed up to a high degree.” But what if they are not dammed up? Then we are looking at futile or self-destructive overexertion. Instead of being an episodic phenomenon, sex turned into our lodestar, our archetype of mood-management. Thanks in part to Wilhelm Reich, the orgasm was no longer an exceptional high, it became the model of how we were ought to be feeling generally. Way up there on Cloud 9. Average was no longer good enough. But the idea that everyone should really be feeling well beyond average all the time – having constant “peak experiences” (in Abraham Maslow’s phrase) meant that there was always going to be lot of disappointed customers.

Reich was an Austrian, originally a disciple of Freud’s, who broke with him over Freud’s notion of sublimation. Civilisation, said Freud, depends on you bottling up all that libinidal energy of yours, and channelling it into doing something creative, like writing novels, composing symphonies or building bridges and tall buildings. Rubbish, said Reich. The orgasm (no ordinary orgasm moreover, it has to be “full”) – that rapturous release of endorphins and assorted chemicals – is good for you. What we need is more actual orgasms. Thus was the Age of Aquarius born, ie the Sixties, marking an end to the long, grim era of repression. Reich invented the “orgone accumulator”, which became the “orgasmatron” in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. He was eventually arrested for fraud, locked up, and died in prison in the US, aged 60, a martyr to sexual liberation

But this was only the beginning of the happiness industry, branching out into “human potential”, “self-help”, “positive thinking”, and New Age gurus, even Scientology, all of them packaged and purveyed and pharmaceutically-inflected. If you’re feeling blue, why not pop a pill? It’s your constitutional right. Especially if it might make you more productive or more “authentic”. We have ended up in a situation where no one feels they are really getting enough, of just about anything. And we are “depraved on account of being deprived” as they say in West Side Story.

Cederström is the co-author, with André Spicer, of The Wellness Syndrome, and together they wrote Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement. He puts me in mind of that bloke in Boswell’s Life of Johnson who says, “I tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.” I couldn’t resist asking Cederström if he considered himself a happy sort of guy. He said that he thought the word itself was now effectively meaningless, as per the passage from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:

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Vladimir: Say you are, even if it’s not true.

Estragon: ​What am I to say?

Vladimir: Say, I am happy.

Estragon: ​I am happy.

Vladimir: So am I.

Estragon: ​So am I.

Vladimir: We are happy.

Estragon: ​We are happy. (Silence.) What do we do now, now that we are happy?

Cederström reckons that “the whole self-actualisation craze had a purpose when it kicked off, in the Sixties, as a reaction against the hyper-patriarchal image of the happy family life with the ‘happy’ housewife and all the rest”. But he clearly thinks that the concept has long outlived its usefulness and is now being sold as a contemporary form of snake oil.

The thing about happiness is that it should happen to you accidentally. You can only be happy until the moment where you start asking yourself the killer question, “Am I really happy?” And then it all falls apart. Hence all the hype and hysteria and desperation around happiness is entirely self-defeating. Happiness underwent a period of massive inflation in the 20th century. Maybe we have reached the point where the bottom has fallen out of the market finally and we need to rethink happiness from the ground up.

I think the Greeks had a good idea in “ataraxia”. They didn’t think of the orgasm as the be-all and end-all. The point about ataraxia is that you are neither feeling particularly good nor particularly bad, but have attained a neutral state – a kind of degree zero – in which your desires give you a break for a time. Rather than maximum gratification we are looking at the minimisation of regret.

As someone suggested to me the other day, happiness equals reality minus expectations. I think stoicism is superior to mere happiness because it allows that there is and there will be suffering in the world and the best you can hope for is to be able to adjust your attitude towards it. As Epicurus says, when you drop your favourite vase and it smashes into a thousand pieces no one expects you be jumping for joy. But you might be able (with a truly heroic effort) be able to say to yourself, “The vase has been restored.”

The other problem with happiness is, oddly enough, the same problem that affects surfing. It’s an essentially selfish state of being. It’s all about feeling good within yourself. It’s an internal, physiological and emotional state. Which means, in effect, that it is devoid of any morality. Harvey Weinstein was just trying to be happy too. Pursuing his democratic rights.

Carl Cederström sees Donald Trump as the ultimate flowering of the human potential movement. Even the president speaks of “tapping human potential”. Just as, at the same time, he speaks of “grabbing pussy” or celebrating the NRA. Happiness, as John Lennon said, “is a warm gun”. That’s my constitutional right too. Which has become practically synonymous with a lack of impulse control. I enjoy having a drink, don’t I? Or a big fat cheeseburger. So isn’t it my right to go on eating and drinking myself to death? I want to feel good, even if that way perdition lies (not to mention diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver). As the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman once said (before OD’ing on heroin), “There is no pleasure I haven’t actually made myself sick on.” Cederström himself recalls anything but fondly a week of limitless hedonistic excess in the Canary Islands, leading to an all-time hangover.

Happiness, in any case, is largely an illusion. We tend to think of other people as being or at least looking happy. And definitely happier than ourselves. The fact is they aren’t, we just think they are. All those blissfully smiling beautiful people – they’re just as screwed up as everyone else. Social media only serves to spread the delusion. I once asked my son, who was supposed to be studying at university at the time, if his life was constant partying. “Why would you think that?” He asked. “Because all I see of you on Facebook is pictures of you dancing or getting drunk at parties.” He scoffed at my naivety. “That’s only because no one ever posts pictures of themselves sitting at the library and reading a book or writing an essay.”

Happiness is a myth that only serves the interests of the happiness-conjurors and the manufacturers of birthday cards. I think happiness has now entered its twilight zone. I can’t see feeling good being of any intrinsic value unless it is also coupled to doing good. Aristotle had something like this in mind when he defined happiness (or eudaimonia) as leading a virtuous life. I think this is what Cederström is hoping for in the future when he speaks of “collective happiness”.

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But there is another issue here: just as happiness can dissolve into a kind of self-satisfaction, having one’s fellow humans in mind is only another kind of narcissism at the level of the species. One of the most ecstatic non-anthropocentric moments I can recall is when I was cycling through a park and a small bird – a sparrow, I think – came flying out of a bush straight out at me, but seeing me in the way, turned at right angles so that – for the space of a second or two – the bird was flying at exactly the height of my head and at the same speed I was cycling. With the effect that we (if I can speak of “we”, the bird and me) briefly flew along together. That was years ago and I can still feel something of what it must feel like to be a bird. It was exceptional and aleatory and probably unrepeatable. But perhaps the oceanic feeling that Freud was so sceptical of – the sense of there being “an indissoluble bond” with the universe – needs to make a comeback.

Andy Martin is the author of ‘Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me’

Carl Cederström’s book, ‘The Happiness Fantasy’, is published by Polity