The Business of Happiness: Has the Discourse of Happiness Become a Mask Hiding Our Societies’ Chronic Depression?
Throughout its long history, humanity has never talked about happiness as much as it does today. The glossary of happiness—which may begin with tranquility and complacency but does not end with career success and pleasure—is abundantly present almost everywhere.
Books that want to introduce us to the secrets of happy people so that we can learn to be like them are widespread, along with multiple types of guidelines that provide the keys to success in five days or throughout fifty exercises.
In the past few years, the discourse about happiness has evaded video streaming sites, such as YouTube, which contains hundreds of thousands of videos that want to give us the key to happiness. It also moved to companies, the workplace, and even governments, some of which assigned ministers and ministers of happiness.
However, the paradox lies in the fact that this discourse flourishes at a time when humanity is living in one of its least happy phases, in light of the collective crises we are experiencing, beginning with climate change and the future of the planet that is in sake and not ending with health and wars. The sadness is evidenced by the unprecedented use of medicines, depression, anxiety, high rates of suicide, and loneliness.
Paradox
This paradox prompted French director Jean-Christophe Ribot and writer Claire Alet to ask, at the beginning of their film The Business of Happiness (Le business du bonheur), which is broadcast by the French-German cultural channel ARTE these days: Is the flourishing discourse on happiness a proof that we live in successful and complete societies or it is a mask that our contemporary societies use to hide their chronic depression and inability to live contentedly and in harmony with their world?
To search for an answer to this question, the tape hosts many psychologists, doctors, academics, and researchers specialized in the issue of happiness. At the same time, it proposes a historical reading of the birth of what is known as positive psychology.
While watching the film, the audience discovers that positive psychology is the main factor behind this contemporary discourse about success and that it is basically an idea that was brought up by an American academic, Martin Seligman, and that businessmen, owners of companies, and capital took it from him, poured millions of dollars so that people, workers in their companies and consumers of their goods, could reach happiness in their work and their consumption.
Happy burnout!
Are you really the best version of yourself? What if your happiness depends only on you? The documentary skillfully shows us that it is difficult today to escape one of these questions as they constantly flood our daily lives: imposed by force in start-ups, invading the shelves of bookstores, and swarming on social networks.
If the search for well-being and a healthy lifestyle has never been so important in our contemporary societies, it is paradoxically accompanied by an increase in the number of burnouts and antidepressants sold. Making happiness a personal responsibility is a way to deny the influence of the social framework that surrounds us.
The search for happiness is not new, but it has become one of the primary injunctions of our Western societies, to the point of constituting a most lucrative market. In the documentary The Business of Happiness, ARTE revealed the underside of positive psychology. Are you more of a "Yes man" or a "No man"?
With devastating humor, the director of Yes Man, Peyton Reed, and his actor Jim Carrey already caricatured in 2008 the famous personal development seminars that were all the rage in the United States since the end of the 1990s.
Skeptical of the XXL masses of American gurus, it is ultimately through the private sector and business management that positive psychology has conquered the world. Are the ideas conveyed by this discipline so beneficial?
This is the question that the many specialists invited to the documentary by Claire Alet and Jean-Christophe Ribot tried to answer, going back in detail to the birth and the excesses of this very controversial psychology.
Political Naivety
Despite taking many opinions, the tape represents, first of all, a visual critical thesis about this contemporary flashback as it analyzes, with images and the interventions of specialists, a wide number of statements that we frequently hear today about the need to reconcile with oneself. The necessity to unleash one's potential energies and bring out the best of us, avoiding negative emotions and feelings because of the harm that they contain, to set in a positive and optimistic view of existence, and certainly of working and living conditions.
Yet, the concerns revealed by the film indicate that we may be facing a new type of slavery (the bondage of optimism and success) and political naivety, where the individual is held fully responsible for his poor and harsh living conditions, psychologically, socially, and professionally.
A speech summed up in the film by Swedish sociologist Carl Cederström, ironic of positive psychology: "You have no right to complain," asserting that the only obstacle to one's success is one's self.
Acquiring real academic legitimacy in the 1990s, positive psychology became the spearhead of neo-management and a promising area of investment for business leaders. It will serve the idea that a happy employee is, above all, a productive employee—an idea directly inherited from American culture, that of the American dream and its self-made men.
Remaining fairly neutral in its first part, multiplying the points of view, the documentary succeeds better in its conclusion in raising the real political problems engendered by this movement. The happiness of individuals is indeed advocated at the heart of our societies, as long as it does not call into question inequalities and the political system in which it operates. Devaluing negative thoughts, it certainly succeeds in creating "resilient beings," but above all, to any critical thought.
