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The Happiness Backlash

By Alison Beard

Nothing depresses me more than reading about happiness. Why? Because there’s entirely too much advice out there about how to achieve it. As Frédéric Lenoir points out in Happiness: A Philosopher’s Guide (recently translated from its original French), great thinkers have been discussing this topic for more than 2,000 years. But opinions on it still differ. Just scan the 14,700 titles listed in the “happiness” subgenre of self-help books on Amazon, or watch the 55 TED talks tagged in the same category. What makes us happy? Health, money, social connection, purpose, “flow,” generosity, gratitude, inner peace, positive thinking . . . research shows that any (or all?) of the above answers are correct. Social scientists tell us that even the simplest of tricks—counting our blessings, meditating for 10 minutes a day, forcing smiles—can push us into a happier state of mind.

And yet for me and many others, happiness remains elusive. Of course, I sometimes feel joyful and content—reading a bedtime story to my kids, interviewing someone I greatly admire, finishing a tough piece of writing. But despite having good health, supportive family and friends, and a stimulating and flexible job, I’m often awash in negative emotions: worry, frustration, anger, disappointment, guilt, envy, regret. My default state is dissatisfied.

The huge and growing body of happiness literature promises to lift me out of these feelings. But the effect is more like kicking me when I’m down. I know I should be happy. I know I have every reason to be and that I’m better off than most. I know that happier people are more successful. I know that just a few mental exercises might help me. Still, when I’m in a bad mood, it’s hard to break out of it. And—I’ll admit—a small part of me regards my nonbliss not as unproductive negativity but as highly productive realism. I can’t imagine being happy all the time; indeed, I’m highly suspicious of anyone who claims to be.

I agreed to write this essay because over the past several years I’ve sensed a swell of support for this point of view. Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 book Bright-Sided, about the “relentless promotion” and undermining effects of positive thinking, was followed last year by Rethinking Positive Thinking, by the NYU psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen, and The Upside of Your Dark Side, by two experts in positive psychology, Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener. This year brought a terrific Psychology Today article by Matthew Hutson titled “Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down”; The Upside of Stress, by Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal; Beyond Happiness, by the British historian and commentator Anthony Seldon; and The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, by another Brit, the Goldsmiths lecturer in politics William Davies.

Are we finally seeing a backlash against happiness? Sort of. Most of these recent releases rail against our modern obsession with feeling happy and thinking positively. Oettingen explains the importance of damping sunny fantasies with sober analysis of the obstacles in one’s way. Kashdan and Biswas-Diener’s book and Hutson’s article detail the benefits we derive from all the negative emotions I cited earlier; taken together, those feelings spur us to better our circumstances and ourselves. (The Harvard psychologist Susan David, a coauthor of the HBR article “Emotional Agility,” also writes thoughtfully on this topic.)

McGonigal shows how viewing one unhappy condition—stress—in a kinder light can turn it into something that improves rather than hurts our health. Those who accept feeling stressed as the body’s natural response to a challenge are more resilient and live longer than those who try to fight it.

Seldon describes his own progression from pleasure seeking to more-meaningful endeavors that bring him (and should bring us) joy. Sadly, he trivializes his advice by alphabetizing it: Accepting oneself; Belonging to a group; having good Character, Discipline, Empathy, Focus, Generosity, and Health; using Inquiry; embarking on an inner Journey; accepting Karma; and embracing both Liturgy and Meditation. (One wonders what he’ll use for X and Z in the next book.)

Davies comes at the issue from a different angle. He’s fed up with organizational attempts to tap into what is essentially a “grey mushy process inside our brains.” In his view, there’s something sinister about the way advertisers, HR managers, governments, and pharmaceutical companies are measuring, manipulating, and ultimately making money from our insatiable desire to be happier.

But none of these authors is arguing against individuals’ aspiring to have a generally happy life. We call that the pursuit of “happiness,” but what we really mean is “long-term fulfillment.” Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, calls it “flourishing” and said years ago that positive emotion (that is, feeling happy) is only one element of it, along with engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. In the parlance Arianna Huffington uses in her recent book, it’s “thriving,” and Lenoir, whose history of happiness philosophy is probably the most enlightening and entertaining of the bunch, describes it as simply “love of life.” Who can argue against any of those things?

Where most of the happiness gurus go wrong is insisting that daily if not constant happiness is a means to long-term fulfillment. For some glass-half-full optimists, that may be true. They can “stumble on happiness” the way the field’s most prominent researcher, Dan Gilbert, suggests; or gain “the happiness advantage” that the professor-turned-consultant Shawn Achor talks about; or “broadcast happiness,” as Michelle Gielan, Achor’s wife and partner at the firm GoodThink, recommends in her new book. As I said, it apparently takes just a few simple tricks.

But for the rest of us, that much cheer feels forced, so it’s unlikely to help us mold meaningful relationships or craft the perfect career. It certainly can’t be drawn out of us by employers or other external forces. We pursue fulfillment in different ways, without reading self-help books. And I suspect that in the long run we’ll be OK—perhaps even happy.

ALISON BEARD is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.

Reprinted from Harvard Business Review, July–August 2015.