Happiness

Understandings, Narratives and Discourses

L. Hyman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349458066, 9781137321527
• eBook ISBN: 9781137321534
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Happiness, rather than being a private and subjective experience, is shaped, interpreted and articulated via culturally specific ways of thinking, being and acting. This highly original and timely book offers an empirical exploration of the ways in which being 'happy' is understood and articulated in contemporary society.

1

Introduction

The concept of happiness is such an indeterminate one that even though everyone wishes to attain happiness, yet he can never say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills.

(Kant, 1785/1981:27)

It could be argued that the idea of happiness is ubiquitous in contemporary Western societies such as Europe and North America; it features heavily in popular culture, advertising and mass media more broadly, and it is something that most people would feel is an inevitable goal that they strive to achieve in their lives. Many would feel that it is the pursuit of happiness that stands as the guiding principle of people’s lives; indeed, as the American Declaration of Independence (1776) states, the rights of all men are ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. Although happiness is a ubiquitous aspiration, Kant’s words presented here may have some relevance in the contemporary world; happiness is far from straightforward, and many people may be unable to clearly articulate the specific source and nature of their happiness. On the other hand, it being such a major facet of popular culture and human existence in this way may nevertheless leave people well-placed to be able to articulate and talk about the ways in which they experience and perceive happiness.

This book has been written at a time when happiness and well-being are high up on the agendas of national governments worldwide. Indeed, in November 2010, it was announced by the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, that the United Kingdom’s ‘subjective well-being’ is to be measured on a regular basis, as part of the Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) ‘Measuring National Well-Being’ programme. Data are collected periodically from around 165,000 respondents, as part of their Annual Population Survey, and it is hoped that this will play a key role in government policymaking, as well as providing a metric that can be used as an indicator of societal progress (for more information and results, see Office for National Statistics, 2014). This is also being undertaken by other national governments, such as France, the United States and Bhutan. It is felt that, in line with economists’ findings on the relationship between happiness and wealth (which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 2), measures of well-being offer a more ‘subjective’ alternative to monetary, ‘objective’ measures of progress that are not always reflective of how people feel about their lives.

Whether or not we embrace or approve of the idea of happiness and well-being data being used to monitor national progress, it is clear that happiness plays a prominent role in the way that societies are organised. It also has a strong presence within print and broadcast media. The frequency at which articles and stories on the topic, appealing to the general public, are publicised is another indicator of the increased preoccupation that many sectors of society have with the concept of happiness. For instance, articles entitled ‘Happiness and Well-Being Trump Material Growth’ (Richardson, 2014) and ‘Happiness Is Good for Your Health, So What Are Councils Doing about It?’ (Fearn, 2014) were published in the Guardian in April 2014, within a period of ten days; stories of a similar nature are reported via other news outlets on an equally regular basis.

Happiness seems also to be unavoidable within popular and public discourse. Mental health charities ‘Mind’ and ‘Rethink Mental Illness’ established the ‘Time to Change’ campaign in 2007, the aim of which was to ‘end the discrimination that surrounds mental health’ (Time to Change, 2014). The campaign acknowledged that there is a stigma attached to mental illness, including depression and anxiety, and that there is a need to eradicate this. The campaign continues to be ongoing, and their website includes stories from sufferers of depression who express feelings of embarrassment and shame about their situation. There therefore continues to exist a societal pressure to appear happy and contented – and appearing happy is perhaps what we have come to understand as ‘normal’. Indeed, we are frequently presented with images of a happier life by the burgeoning self-help industry; not only do many bookshops now contain growing self-help sections, but there is also a rapidly increasing selection of websites, videos and smartphone apps that promise to help their users to find more happiness. Techniques such as meditation and mindfulness are also becoming increasingly popular, and their design and endorsement by academics and practicing psychological professionals lends support to their perceived effectiveness and success. A well-known example is Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, developed by Mark Williams, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Oxford. Books and courses devoted to it can be purchased by people who wish to find ‘peace in a frantic world’ (Williams and Penman, 2011).

Happiness and sociology: The odd couple

Despite its societal ubiquity, happiness, for many sociologists, has not been a popular area of inquiry, and as a result, it is rather underresearched across the discipline. This is despite its – albeit implicit – place in classical sociology; indeed, Weber writes about the ways in which life was shaped by religious ethics and the way people chose to live in order that otherworldly salvation was granted (Weber, 1904/2002). Similarly, Durkheim’s work suggests that people seek happiness and well-being through a new moral order characterised by rituals and community (Durkheim, 1912/1961), and Marx’s theory of alienation regarded workers in capitalist societies as being distinctly unhappy as a result of alienation and an inability to realise their species-being (Marx and Engels, 1988). Nevertheless, few studies of happiness specifically exist as sociology has traditionally preoccupied itself with pathologies of society such as injustice, inequality, pain and suffering. In addition, happiness does not appear to sit well within any particular subfield of sociology; its place within the sociology of emotions, although important (as will be explored in Chapter 2), is not a wholly appropriate one, as happiness is not necessarily just an emotion, but also an aspect of personhood. By the same token, it is not fully welcome within the sociology of identity, due to its emotional characteristics.

Many of sociology’s key theoretical underpinnings tend to be focused upon negative feeling, rather than on happiness; this is particularly the case with Marx and Engels (1988), who regard workers as being alienated, Weber, who asserts that we are trapped in an ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy (1904/2002), and Simmel, who recognises that modern life is characterised by a loss of emotional vitality (1903). This may, in part, explain sociology’s hostility to happiness scholarship. However, this also raises broader questions about the kind of relationship that critical sociology and social theory should have with the study of happiness. For Marxists and critical theorists, at least, happiness could be regarded as a naïve aspiration which is, in reality, an impossibility for most people living in an unequal, capitalist society. Nevertheless, as already highlighted, it occupies a central position in contemporary British society, and whether one understands it as a tool used by capitalists to maintain a false consciousness, or as a pleasant state that people should actively strive for, it is a goal that stands at the centre of many people’s lives. Thus, if happiness is so important to people in this way, and is so central to the way in which society is governed and organised, then surely it should be a legitimate area for sociological investigation.

About this book

This book seeks to provide a sociological understanding of how people experience and perceive happiness. It does this by grounding an analysis of happiness within the first-hand accounts of 19 British adults, who were interviewed as part of an empirical study on which this book is based. These adults were asked a range of questions (see Appendix 1 for profiles of each respondent and Appendix 2 for a list of questions used in interviews). Their accounts, extracts of which are presented throughout the book, should not be seen as secondary to the analytic discussion; rather, the narratives of the interviewees are integral to this story and make up some of the most important aspects of the understanding of happiness that this book puts forward.

The book focuses specifically on the way in which people articulate their experiences and perceptions of happiness. Whilst it does this in a general sense, it also explores the ways in which interpersonal relationships, money and working life feature in people’s understandings of happiness. This does not necessarily undermine the importance of other areas of life – such as health or religion – for happiness, but rather, they were chosen as a focus for the book as they were talked about in more detail by interviewees than other factors.

Discourses and narratives

One way of understanding how people articulate their ideas about happiness is to examine the discourses within which they position themselves when doing so, and this is the approach that this book takes. The term ‘discourse’ is used to refer to the notion of it that Michel Foucault uses in his work. In a discussion of what discourse is, he states that ‘alongside everything a society can produce (alongside: that is to say, in a determinate relationship with) there is the formation and transformation of “things said”’ (Foucault, 1991:63). A discourse is made up of statements and is based upon a set of rules that prescribe which speech acts are to have meaning. It is these rules that are the main focus of Foucault’s notion of discourse, rather than the language that is used, or the psyches of the human subjects who carry out the speech acts (Foucault, 1991). These rules, Foucault argues, are specific to time periods and societies, and they determine a number of things, including what it is possible to say and to talk about (as well as what it is possible to say in particular domains); which utterances are likely to be remembered for long periods of history and which may be more quickly forgotten; and who is likely to have access to certain discourses (that is, do certain groups or classes have better access than others?) (Foucault, 1972). However, discourses are not necessarily fixed or static; they can change if and when new utterances are added to them. Multiple discourses can also be employed simultaneously, depending upon what is being expressed through them. If and when this is the case, different discourses can compete with one another, creating tensions in people’s thoughts or accounts. They are, furthermore, not things that are controlled by powerful beings; instead, ‘discoursing subjects form a part of the discursive field’ (Foucault, 1991:58). That is, they are not simply pre-existing structures that subjects – or people – ‘use’, but they are also formations that people themselves create and change, when new utterances are added. Foucault also stresses that the study of discourse is not about seeking to understand their hidden or underlying meanings, but to understand their actual form and appearance, as well as the field or conditions in which they are used or deployed. Every time period is characterised by a number of dominant discourses, which people situate themselves in, in order to make sense of their lives and the social world, to accord them with meaning. It is discourse itself that allows people to understand what is ‘sayable’ at each particular time point in history (Foucault, 1972, 1991). Indeed, happiness is one aspect of people’s lives that is understood through a range of dominant discourses. Rather than simply being a ‘private’, internal experience, happiness is something that is shaped, interpreted and articulated via culturally specific ways of thinking, being and acting (Jackson, 1999). Furthermore, it could even be argued that the way in which people talk about happiness, and the way in which they position themselves within discourses of it is ‘a means by which we participate in creating a shared sense’ (1999:101) of what happiness is.

So, what are the discourses that people position themselves in when they are making sense of what happiness is, and how they experience it? Do people tend to use a set of dominant discourses, which together illuminate the shared or common ways in which happiness is understood in contemporary Britain? The discourses that people commonly situate themselves in when making sense of happiness will be explored, with reference to interviewees’ accounts, in chapters 3–6. The term ‘narrative’ will also be employed to refer to something similar; in the same way that people can construct, but also make use of available narratives, or stories, about their own experiences of love (Jackson, 1993), experiences of happiness can also be articulated and made sense of via narrative. These are often shared and are one way in which we can start to examine the ways in which happiness is socially patterned.

Outline of the book

Chapter 2 sets the scene of the book by grounding it in a range of scholarly debates on happiness. Sociological literature on happiness is, as already discussed, rather scarce, but the chapter focuses on work that has been done by economists and psychologists that is often placed under the heading ‘the science of happiness’. This largely focuses upon its measurement and determinants. The idea that increases in wealth are not partnered by increases in happiness is introduced here, as a rationale for needing measures of it as ‘subjective’ indicators of social progress. Some of the key determinants of happiness that have been put forward by scholars working in this area are also highlighted. The chapter also examines a range of sociological works, underlining the social aspects of happiness, and explaining the ways in which it can be understood as both an aspect of selfhood and identity, and an emotion.

Chapter 3 explores what people understand happiness to be, doing so through the analysis of interviewees’ accounts. They positioned themselves in a range of different discourses when articulating what happiness is to them, and two broad ideas are considered; firstly, that happiness is understood to be characterised by an essentiality, rendering it immune and resistant to social factors, and secondly, that it is located within a complex normative framework whereby cultural guidelines prescribe specific ways in which happiness ought to be displayed and experienced.

The focus of Chapter 4 is the role that ‘therapeutic discourse’ occupies in people’s accounts of happiness. This is a discourse that frames people’s experiences of it, and, after explaining what it is about, I demonstrate how ideas surrounding the self and the individual are commonly regarded as being fundamental for happiness; that is, that happiness is largely constructed as a subjective, personal experience, the attainment of which is the responsibility of the individual, rather than anyone or anything else. Furthermore, the chapter also delineates the ways in which this discourse is related to a distinctive vocabulary and way of thinking that has become widely adopted amongst British people and others in the West.

Chapter 5 sets out some of the ways in which people understand the significance of interpersonal relationships for happiness. These are indeed regarded as extremely important, and, by the same token, loneliness is highlighted as a major source of unhappiness. However, a tension emerges as this idea has been found to compete with tenets of therapeutic discourse, explored in Chapter 4; on one hand, an individual is expected to be solely responsible for his or her own happiness, but on the other, relationships are crucial for a happy life. This tension is considered in detail here.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship between happiness and money and working life, which were two of the ‘determinants’ of happiness highlighted by other scholars (discussed in Chapter 2). People not only recognised money and work as important factors in a happy life, but also positioned themselves within therapeutic discourse in their accounts of this importance. With regard to work, fulfilment was acknowledged as fundamental for job satisfaction, and with regard to money, people positioned themselves as distinct or different from an ‘other’ who may choose to spend money on expensive consumer goods (and draw happiness from this), claiming that money cannot actually ‘buy’ happiness.

Chapter 7 brings together the book’s key conclusions and reflects upon the sociological understanding of happiness that has been offered throughout. It considers some of the ways in which the application of a sociological lens to happiness and well-being could inform and be useful for government policymaking. The chapter ends with an appeal to sociologists for greater acknowledgement of happiness in their work.

2

Happiness: The Story So Far

Happiness is a contested idea, and it is this that this book seeks to explore, via a sociological analysis of a range of lay accounts surrounding the issue. However, before these accounts are presented and examined, the scene must be set. This chapter thus delineates a number of scholarly debates within which this book, and the study on which it is based, can be framed. As highlighted in the book’s Introduction, there exists a relative paucity of sociological work on happiness. That which has been undertaken tends either to focus mainly upon its measurement and determinants, rather than what it is understood to be, which is the focus of this book, or simply regards happiness as an outcome of other social phenomena (such as relationships or work) without necessarily examining it in detail. This, on the one hand, poses a problem as far as this book is concerned, as it cannot be easily placed within an existing academic context. However, on the other hand, it paves the way for this book to act as a pioneering work on the study of lay perceptions and understandings of happiness. I shall therefore demonstrate how ideas presented in this book complement those that are already known in both sociology and beyond, and how they can address and begin to fill this lacuna that has hitherto been overlooked. That is, if happiness is something that can be measured, as many debates suggest, then how is it initially experienced and brought about? Do people seek and experience happiness from the determinants, or sources, that have been highlighted in these scholarly works? The chapter shall begin with a brief discussion of the contribution to happiness studies of philosophy, particularly classical Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, and later branches of philosophy, such as utilitarianism. It shall then examine, in perhaps a rather piecemeal way, social scientific debates on happiness from the past 40 years from disciplines such as Economics and Psychology (which are often grouped under the heading of the ‘science of happiness’, with a focus upon its measurement and maximisation), before considering sociological work on emotion, the self and, of course, happiness itself.

Happiness and philosophy

Scholarly studies of happiness are by no means new. Plato, in The Republic (380 BC/1998) wrote about the way in which a balanced soul which is free of any conflict is central to the idea of happiness or eudaimonia (a Greek word meaning ‘flourishing’). Having this means that happiness – or a state of absolute peace, joy and contentment – can be achieved. For Plato, one way in which happiness can be achieved is by acquiring the virtue of justice, where each part of the human soul is working in harmony. Having such a soul would prevent any external or material circumstances from allowing a person to lose their inner composure. Happiness for Plato can also be achieved through the practice of philosophy, or by contemplating the world of ‘being’; this is eternal, in contrast to the impermanence of aspects of the physical world. In both cases then, happiness is achieved when an individual achieves internal balance and harmony. Whilst it could be suggested that modern conceptions of happiness differ from those of Plato, I argue here that the ideas of inner balance and harmony remain very relevant. In subsequent chapters of this book, I shall document the ways in which many people make sense of happiness as something internal, private and subjective, and that to draw happiness from aspects of the physical world (such as money, or medicine) is not ‘right’ or ‘authentic’. This, as well as whether any other dimensions of Plato’s work resonate with the discourses used by people in producing their accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of happiness, will be explored in chapters 3–6 of the book.

Aristotle – a pupil of Plato’s – also wrote about happiness and stated that it is intimately related to virtue (350 BC/1998). Like Plato, he used eudaimonia to refer to happiness. This he related more to the idea of flourishing, which, rather than an emotional state, is about fulfilling one’s pote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Happiness: The Story So Far
• 3. What Is Happiness?
• 4. The Happy Self: Understanding Happiness through Therapeutic Discourse
• 5. ‘Pack Animals’? Interpersonal Relationships and Happiness
• 6. Orientations to Money, Working Life and Happiness
• 7. Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Respondent Profiles
• Appendix 2: Interview Questions
• Bibliography
• Index