Industrial Happiness

Creating an environment at work that supports a positive, bridge-building culture drives success in a way that is infectious and cumulative. Positive broadcasters are able to nurture cultures at the office that support … Social support is the greatest predictor of happiness that exists”–Michelle Gielan, Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Social Change.

“There is no path to happiness; happiness is the path,” a soothing, feminine voice says in 100 Quotes by Gautama Buddha: Great Philosophers and Their Inspiring Thoughts, which audiobook I downloaded as a self-care method to inspire myself in the morning as I put makeup on and “get ready” for the day, and/or to calm anxiety by turning my commute down Interstate 75 more “productive”–I’m “working on” myself, after all, so the hour-forty-five minute drive isn’t all that bad compared the the forty-minute drive it is supposed to be.

But on a quick Google search of this quote I discovered that it is not actually by Buddha but, according to the reputable (enough) source brainyquote.com, by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk, Zen master, and peace activist according to Amazon.com who actually said, “There is no way to happiness; happiness is the way.” You can “buy” his sayings on a calendar and in best-selling books. As a side note, 100 Quotes is available for free on YouTube or for the $4.91 which I, not knowing this, paid on Amazon.

To buy means “to get possession of by giving an equivalent, usually in money; to obtain by paying a price; to purchase” (OED). We can “buy” an object with an “equivalent” in money or via another method. Take, for instance, the phrase: “I buy that” or “I’m not buying it” with regard to a philosophical quote (i.e., the above) or an explanation (i.e., a child’s fantastical explanation when the parent asks how did the scribbles on the wall happen).

In her book The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed’s not “buying” the happiness industry that profits from people like me who buy books like 100 Quotes by Gautama Buddha, Carl Jung, Marcus Aurelius and glossed-over maxims of philosophical bad boy Friedrich Nietzsche; or the book that helped me realize after putting into practice all the suggestions in Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change. I adopted positive practices such as “Capitalize on positivity,” “Overcome Stress and Negativity,” “Create a Positive Ripple Effect” which I must say did work well in my negative work setting–as well as could be expected in that environment–then in assisting me to ignite change to move from that work setting to one far more suited to my personality (moving from the military to the humanities). Of books like Gielan’s ($14.99 for the Kindle edition), Ahmed writes:

It is now common to refer to ‘the happiness industry’: happiness is both produced and consumed through these books, accumulating value as a form of capital. Barbara Gunnell (2004) describes how ‘the search for happiness is certainly enriching a lot of people. The feel-good industry is flourishing. Sales of self-help books and CDs that promise a more fulfilling life have never been higher (Ahmed 3).

I “bought” Ahmed’s book (Kindle edition: $13.99) for my lit class I’m taking on self-care and I “buy” much of Ahmed’s principles and methodology (I highlighted the hell out of that book yesterday)–but I also “buy” the “happiness” principles that have assisted me with combatting depression and getting unstuck from my life in many ways over the past several years. Is it possible, now that I have acquired both of these books on my (digital) shelf, that my capital–both human and monetary–has been used appropriately and not counteractively by purchasing Ahmed’s anti-happiness industry book after the positive psychology books that I also value? I (want to) argue yes, that through the process of integration and thinking through (mindfully) both sides of the happiness (and unhappiness) equation, integration is possible and the “utility” (as Ahmed states/examines) of both books makes them worth the space they take up on my digital and mental shelves.

“When is the mental museum’s collection complete?” Deidre Shauna Lynch asks in her book The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (with no Kindle edition, it is “worth” $34 paperback on Amazon) “At what point in its sequence of collecting is the self itself?” (Lynch 85). Because I, a good, post 18th-century consumer and participant in capitalist market culture, assert and define my individuality–my “self”–via the ideas that I collect, it is my “responsibility” to integrate them into a cohesive whole (aka: write about it). The introduction of Ahmed’s Promise of Happiness critiques books that claim the ability to measure happiness:

• Happiness becomes a more genuine way of measuring progress; happiness, we might say is, the ultimate performance indicator (Ahmed 4).
• The science of happiness shares a history with political economy: just recall Adam Smith’s argument in The Wealth of Nations that capitalism advances us from what he might call ‘miserable equality’ to what we could call a ‘happy inequality’ such that a ‘workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.’ Of course, nineteenth-century utilitarianism involves an explicit refutation of such a narrative, in which inequality becomes the measure of advancement and happiness (Ahmed 4).
• The science of happiness presumes that happiness is ‘out there, that you can measure happiness and that these measurements are objective (Ahmed 5).
• Happiness research does not simply measure feelings; it also interprets what it measures (Ahmed 6).
• If we have a duty to promote what causes happiness, then happiness itself becomes a duty (Ahmed 6).

However, in the course of Ahmed’s book these problems are worked-out, or at least examined in interesting and compelling ways. She even ends the book–which starts off seeming like a “killjoy” about the will to increase happiness by seeing it, for example, as a worthy “path” in and of itself as the “Buddha”/Thich Nhat Hanh states–by “capitalizing” on a practice which Gielan suggests in her book as a way to “Broadcast Positivity”: unlike Foucault, who has been criticized for making depressing claims on power and its operation in the world and offering no suggested remedies, Ahmed examines the problem (as Gielan suggests to do) then ends on positive notes–what those in former news reporter/anchor Gielan’s business call a positive “call to action.” For instance, in stories about global warming, reporters ought not to end the story on a depressing note (or people won’t read stories on global warming anymore) but rather with a set of small action steps that anyone can do. This is one way of igniting social change, according to Gielan’s positive psychology research, and it is a tactic Ahmed’s book capitalizes on.

In Broadcasting Happiness, Gielan’s call-to-action focuses not just on the individual, but also on the potential benefits that would happen if the news media were to adopt positive broadcasting principles and practices as well:

Transformative Journalism is the key to transforming society at large. You can be the broadcaster to point them toward this new model. While the news media as a whole might not yet be ready to make the great shift, I think we—individuals and organizations—need not wait. As broadcasters ourselves, we can use the same strategies in our own lives to create upward spirals of positive change. Although you might already be broadcasting happiness to some degree, there is always more that can be done, and more importantly, you can activate others to boost their own signals (Gielan).

Therefore, is it really a bad thing if the “happiness industry” continues gaining momentum? Not to be a “killjoy,” but Ahmed’s book provides the necessary cautionary tales for what happens when “happiness” becomes a “duty” so that we can avoid this individually and collectively. Ahmed, though, provides these individual and collective “calls to action” in her conclusion:

• A rethinking of happiness as possibility might also allow us to care for those forms of happiness that are directed in the wrong way (Ahmed 199).
• When there is a crisis, we have to ask the question “which way?” When the way turns into a question, you become aware of possibility (199).
• I would not say that unhappiness is necessary. But I would say that unhappiness is always possible, which makes the necessity of happiness an exclusion not just of unhappiness but of possibility. As Søren Kierkegaard describes so beautifully: “This possibility that is said to be so light is commonly regarded as the possibility of happiness, fortune etc. But this is not possibility…. No, in possibility all things are equally possible, and whoever has truly been brought up by possibility has grasped the terrible as well as the joyful” (199).
• To have a sense of the happenstance would involve being open to the possibility of good and bad things happening. We could say that happiness would be a possibility kept open by happenstance, such that the condition of possibility for happiness includes other possibilities (199).
• We can value happiness for its precariousness, as something that comes and goes, as life does (199).
• A rethinking of happiness as possibility might also allow us to care for those forms of happiness that are directed in the wrong way (199).

Notes

1. Ahmed’s Kindle edition book costs $1 less than Gielan’s whose Kindle edition book costs $14.99. Therefore, capitalism’s supply and demand values the books, critical and supportive of the happiness tradition respectively, at about the same price. Capitalism still profits from Ahmed’s critique of “happiness” as an industry just as much as it does from Gielan’s (although it would also be interesting to look into the book sales, the price point is a good economic indicator on Amazon, the world’s bookselling behemoth).
2. The $4.91 book 100 Quotes by Gautama, a positive psychology practice in the form of mantra repetition, is worth about 32% of Ahmen’s and Gielan’s books on positive psychology, albeit much less laborious to produce as the intellectual capital was plucked from (not necessarily accurate) quotes attributed to Buddha, not crafted like a scholarly or journalist’s research and at approximately 15 minutes versus several hours in length when read out loud. All three are likely at appropriate price points to “make”/”generate” some income for the publishers.
3. Lynch’s book, a scholarly title from Northwestern UP, focuses on similar issues as Ahmed and Gielan in terms of “the business of inner meaning” (which is a form of and way to, happiness) because of more-limited (specialized) demand is valued “more” by the marketplace to make up for the costs of producing it (which also was subsidized by grants, etc.).
4. These works that help us to think about happiness, therefore, come at a cost–that we pay–to contemplate the very thing, product, object–happiness and the pursuit/promise thereof–being “sold” to us. They are how-to manuals for understanding our long-held “values.”

Works Cited (lowest to highest according to price/”value”)

$0.00 on Youtube or $4.91 on Amazon: 100 Quotes by Gautama Buddha: Great Philosophers and Their Inspiring Thoughts, read by Sarah Ahmed. Audible: 2016.

$13.99 Kindle edition: Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP: 2010.

$14.99 Kindle edition: Gielan, Michelle. Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change. BenBella Books, Inc: 2015.

$34.00 paperback: Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Northwestern UP: 1998.