Authors warn of the tyranny of happiness, pleasure and positive thinking

In the movie “Margin Call – The Day Before the End” (USA, 2011), an American investment bank lays off 80% of its employees during the 2008 financial meltdown. Kevin Spacey’s character is the head of the company’s risk department and, right after the shutdowns, clapping his hands, he addresses a few words to the remaining employees:

“You’re still here for a reason. Eighty percent of our people just got sent home. We spent the last hour saying ‘bye’. You were good people, and you were good at what you did, but you’re better. have left, let’s not think about them anymore. This is your opportunity. (…) Three out of seven people who were between you and your boss’s job no longer work here. This is your chance.”

In another film, “Stop-Stop Love” (USA, 2009), the misfortune of being fired is quickly converted into an opportunity to pursue one’s dreams, as guided by George Clooney’s character, who travels the world to fire people.

Techniques such as those of the characters “have become useful in the contemporary corporate world by shifting the burden of responsibility from the company to employees and managing them in terms of their personal happiness,” Spanish psychologist Edgar Cabanas and Moroccan sociologist Eva Illouz write in the book “Happycracia: Making Happy Citizens”, which has just been released in Brazil by the publisher Ubu.

In the publication, the authors trace the losses and discomfort left by the discourse that establishes individual happiness as the supreme goal of life and highlight the side effects in relation to the personal, professional and social spheres.

In the job market, happiness – until then an expected objective from the work activity – has become a requirement for hiring, maintaining and promoting the position.

Happy employees represent the guarantee that “they will work to the fullest, remain motivated, enjoy what they do and increase productivity”, they exemplify in the book.

Especially in the face of adversity, with the promotion of attitudes such as resilience and self-management, employees would bear the psychological costs of a company’s weaknesses and instabilities.

This means that the working conditions do not matter, whether they are precarious or exhausting: the recipe transmitted to the worker is that with more commitment, resilience and positivity, he can change his reality and enjoy himself with the glass half full. The empty, unwanted glass reveals problems such as burnoutphysical and mental exhaustion resulting from professional activity, and psychological illnesses, such as depression.

According to Illouz and Cabanas, the influence of happiness in the corporate environment did not happen by chance and is also found in government administrations, with emphasis on the adherents of neoliberalism.

It derives from the significant impact of positive psychology, presented in 2000 in a manifesto by psychologist and then president of the American Psychological Association Martin Seligman with the purpose of spreading a science focused on positive emotions and self-determination as a path to happiness.

The proposal, according to the researchers, was welcomed not only by academics, the press, opinion makers and the general public, but also by economists and politicians who saw happiness as the key to measuring the success of a society.

Methodologies were created to quantify subjective criteria such as well-being, balance and pleasure, and happiness indices began to guide public policies in several countries, to the detriment of actions aimed at income distribution and the promotion of rights.

Circus instead of bread

“There is nothing wrong with seeking happiness. It is in fact a fundamental right. Individuals have the right to define for themselves what makes them feel good”, argues Eva Illouz in an interview with BBC News Brasil.

“We study positive psychology, which is a very specific distortion of the idea of ​​happiness, it has become a subdiscipline of economics and serves the purpose of many countries, both democratic and dictatorial. Many governments are trying to replace a fair redistribution of resources with happiness. something that should worry us”, adds Illouz, who is director of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, in France.

“If you measure happiness and declare that this is the goal of policy, you end up considering it better to have profoundly unequal countries than more egalitarian societies, simply because people in India declare that they are happier than people in France.”

In practice, explains the sociologist, the search for citizen satisfaction replaces the principles of freedom and justice.

“If I created a gaming society and made people happy, would it be a better society?” he asks.

In an interview with BBC News Brasil, Illouz and Cabanas warn that one of the problems with presenting happiness as the most fundamental objective to be pursued in life is to neglect values ​​as important as equality, solidarity or justice.

“The fact that these other values ​​are necessary to be happy is completely ignored. Few factors are as determinant for happiness as inequality, for example.”

“Indeed, perhaps no other sociological factor is more strongly and clearly related to well-being and mental health than inequality. The data on this is solid and compelling: rates of mental illness are unmistakably higher in societies with greater income differences”, the researchers explain.

Every man for himself

It’s not today that happiness is such a valuable desire. But its parameters changed and began to orbit around the “I”, so that being happy became a personal quest, associated with the acquisition and development of three psychological characteristics: emotional self-management, authenticity and flourishing.

To host happiness within you, there is an industry available, in which courses, therapeutic and coachesinner strength trainings, self-help literature, motivational talks, meditation techniques, wellness measuring apps and counseling.

Edgar Cabanas, who is a professor and researcher at the Camilo José Cela University in Madrid, explains to BBC News Brasil that the notion of happiness analyzed in the book establishes that the good life would not be a social, cultural and political issue, but a matter of choice. individual, personal responsibility and subjective factors such as attitude and willpower.

Under this premise, when looking at our reality, it is not surprising that many consider that the more than 660,000 deaths from Covid-19 in Brazil should not have an impact on people’s productivity and sociability. Just look for a way out within yourself.

According to Cabanas, the promise that happiness depends on us and only us is attractive, but “quite short-sighted and problematic”.

“On the one hand, it neglects the fact that we cannot achieve a good life in the absence of good social and living conditions: precariousness, inequality or uncertainty are determinants for individuals to be happy, but this notion of happiness negates this fact.”

On the other hand, adds the researcher, people become unfairly responsible for their happiness and unhappiness.

“When things go wrong, it places a huge burden on individuals who suffer not only from their misfortune, but also from the guilt that comes with the idea that they, and they alone, are the cause of their pain and problems. .”

The stigma of dissatisfaction

The pressure to be happy also exposes the confusion between health and normality. Cabanas claims that the dominant discourse of happiness says that only happy people are well-adjusted and functioning individuals, while not being or not feeling happy enough is a sign of personal maladjustment and poor (mental and physical) health.

“That’s not correct. Many people are perfectly functional, healthy and don’t necessarily claim to be happy. On the contrary, many people who claim to be happy have mental health problems and social maladjustment.”

The psychologist adds that this second group of people is especially problematic.

“Many people feel pressured to appear happier than they really are, even under adverse circumstances. One of the harmful consequences of the tyranny of happiness and positive thinking is that we are forced to say we feel better than we actually do because unhappiness or malaise have become signs of a defective psyche.”

In this way, unhappiness has become a social stigma and, as such, tends to be experienced as something shameful for many.

“There’s nothing wrong with not feeling good. It’s just normal. As we say in the book, the problem comes when we make happiness the new normal. Not only is this unrealistic, it can also be very harmful.”

Sociologist Eva Illouz reminds us that seeking one’s own happiness at all costs has the price of neglecting other aspects of human existence:

“Being involved in collective initiatives, being sensitive to the flaws and failures of the world, not seeing dissatisfaction as a pathology.”

Wellness addicts

Well-being and pleasure, commonly associated with happiness formulas, are an irrefutable invitation of our time. However, they establish a dangerous relationship with addictions, ponders the American psychiatrist Anna Lembke, author of “Nação Dopamina: why excess pleasure is making us unhappy and what we can do to change”, recently available in Brazil by the publisher Vestígio .

In the book, the Stanford University professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine examines the seemingly harmless compulsive behaviors that develop under the guise of feeling good. Boundless well-being is very costly, she warns.

Dopamine, a neurotransmitter commonly associated with our pleasurable activities, can also play a role in suffering, as pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping regions of the brain that work like a balance.

In other words, the greater the delight, the greater the degree of suffering necessary for brain balance. With full supply and demand for happiness, living becomes increasingly challenging in terms of balance, especially when we look at our social networks or options. of entertainment and consumption. A euphoric and promising world seems to be within reach of a click.

“Technology has allowed us to isolate ourselves from many physically painful experiences and increase our access to reinforcing drugs and behaviors at the touch of a finger. The result is that we are bombarding our brain’s reward pathway with dopamine,” warns the author in interview with BBC News Brazil.

“Too many good things turn out to be bad things, and the result is that we are reprogramming our brains to need more and more rewards to experience any pleasure, while the smallest inconvenience has become a kind of torture. We are physiologically changing our brains to need more pleasure and be able to tolerate less pain.”

All of this takes place in a culture that is determined to avoid pain at all costs, Lembke recalls. Medicines, drugs and compulsions appear as allies in this impossible mission, while we do not observe a decrease in cases of depression and anxiety.

“The idea that life should be one big party and that we should be happy all the time is an illusion, but one that our culture has bought. The result is that when we are not happy, we think that something is wrong with us, that we are sick. , unlucky or some combination of that sort. The truth is, life is mostly about being discontented, and moments of true happiness are fleeting, often spontaneous.”

In addition to its possibilities of approximation, social networks have also become a way to ‘drug’ human connection, so swiping right or left is all about dopamine and arousal, exemplifies Lembke.

“The ‘numbering’ of the experience, in the form of rankings and likes, makes the experience more like a drug and less like a relationship. Anyway, the more we can make social media more about authentic human connections and less about staying stoned, better”, he adds.