‘I just found this fascinating, that people who want to be happy are actually the ones that are not happy.” So observed Julia Vogt, co-author of a new study that found those who valued happiness most highly tended to show greater signs of depression.
Future historians may well look upon today’s western societies and puzzle about the desperation to be happy. It’s not that happiness is not good. Nor is it to deny that mental wellbeing is important. But mental wellbeing is not the same as an obsession with happiness (in fact, the very opposite, as Vogt’s study shows).
The aim of today’s happiness industry is not about allowing people to live a flourishing life. It is, rather, as Will Davies observed in his book The Happiness Industry, partly a means of behaviour management on the part of both governments and private enterprise, to ensure a more pliant society and a more productive and profitable one.
It is partly, also, a means of “self-optimisation”, by which, as psychologist Peter Bloom observes, “small-scale personal empowerment” goes hand in hand with “large-scale social disempowerment”.
Aristotle argued that “eudaimonia” (which is often translated as happiness, but is probably better thought of as meaning a flourishing life) is the only thing that humans desire for their own sake. He did not mean by this that it is an end we should set out to seek but, rather, the end we can achieve if we live our life well.
Happiness is not, and cannot be, a goal in itself. It can only be the by-product of other goals. To seek happiness is a bit like trying to be cool. The more you are desperate for it, the less you will be.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
