Are You Happy? Should You Be?

The Globe and Mail is currently doing a very interesting feature on happiness. I was particularly intrigued by this article that I came across yesterday which questions our cultural fascination with the “cult of happiness,” both its legitimacy as an enterprise, and its efficiency in achieving the results we crave. We are obsessed with being happy, and when this happiness eludes us, we’re desperate for someone to tell us how to fix the problem. Everywhere we turn, there are no shortages of “life coaches,” psychologists, therapists, and all manner of “happiness experts” eager to lead us (usually for a handsome fee!) to the promised land of rapturous bliss.

The only problem is that it doesn’t seem to be working. The New Scientist claims that countries that report the highest levels of happiness—such as the United States—also tend to have the highest levels of suicide and depression. Clearly, even in wealthy societies whose citizens enjoy a standard of living that our ancestors could only have dreamed of, the picture is highly ambiguous. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a direct causal link between wealth and happiness. Indeed, increased wealth seems to just open the door to pursuing more exotic and more expensive techniques in our quest for levels of happiness which remain stubbornly elusive.

Some, like Globe writer Leah McLaren, are beginning to wonder if being happy all the time is even an appropriate response to the world we inhabit:

Lately, I’ve come to hate happiness. Or at least the shrink-wrapped version of it that’s being shilled at this workshop. If I often feel annoyed with the state of the world, there is a reason: The state of the world is often annoying. But maybe you’ve been too busy channelling positive energy to notice.

The state of the world is annoying, and the felt need to constantly be giving evidence of one’s happiness progress is both dishonest and impossible. According to one sociologist interviewed for this feature, “the culture of incessant happiness” is, far from an accurate reflection of the happiness quotient of given culture, a major driver of social dissatisfaction:

You’re asked to take yourself as a constant self-improvement, and frankly this never ending quest is exhausting. Much like the diet industry, the quest for happiness creates its own need…. [O]ur relentless personality correction results in “the belaboured self” – a self that is in a constant state of restless renovation and self-improvement.

This “belaboured self” which thinks that life ought to be a one-way trip on the positivity train is also, I would argue, unbiblical. As I was reading this article I couldn’t help but think of the book of Psalms, the prayerbook of the church, which has given God’s people the words to express the ambiguity of existence for millennia. Here, surely, we find an honest reflection of the nature of human life. There is gladness in the good times, and sorrow for the pain we all encounter. There is praise and there is bitter protest, there is joy and there is lament.

The mixed bag of emotions and responses found in the Psalter seems to much more accurately reflect the actual state of the world than the pop psychology which suggests that we need only manage our lives better, or channel our “positive energy” more efficiently to achieve the results we desire. I do not get the sense in the Psalms that my life ought to be one which exhibits steady progress in happiness. The Psalmists quite clearly were not so deluded as to think that the world we live in is perfectly tailored for the maximization of human happiness. The state of the world is frankly acknowledged to be less than ideal; yet there is also a profound sense of trust and hope in the character a God who, it is believed, will one day make things right.

I don’t find the recipe for human happiness in the New Testament either. Jesus told his followers to take up their cross and follow him, and warned them to count the cost of being a disciple. Jesus’ own life was characterized by hardship, deprivation, and, obviously, persecution unto death. Jesus clearly did not come with a formula – as if all that was necessary to unlock the secret to happiness was new information or a new example to show human beings what they had thus far been too thick to figure out on their own.

The very fact that the career of Jesus was necessary is itself a radical diagnosis of the state of the world. We’re not supposed to be happy all the time in a world that is sick, hurting, and sometimes, well, annoying, from a human perspective. But, contra the pop psychologists, I would argue that lack of happiness is not the main problem faced by human beings. Sin is. And in Christ’s dealing with the latter, we believe, the former will ultimately be taken care of as well.

And in the meantime it seems much more appropriate to be honest in our understanding and expectations of life. We ought to enjoy its pleasures and embrace the goodness, harmony and wholeness that we experience and contribute to. At the same time, we ought to lament and resist the injustice, misery, and evil of a world that continues to defy its Creator. And we ought to adopt this more realistic approach not in a resigned acceptance of a state of affairs that is, inexplicably and tragically, less than we would like it to be, but in the hope that the goodness and the happiness we long for is indeed our proper end, and will one day be a reality.