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Myth 1: Don’t Worry, Be Happy
I do have concerns about the overarching societal messaging that we are hearing, which is that we should focus on being happier. That we should choose to be happy and that we should think positive. Now just to be clear I am not anti-happiness. I, in a past life, wrote an 80-chapter, give or take, doorstopper book called The Oxford Handbook of Happiness, which really explored how it is that human beings can develop higher levels of happiness. But what I am concerned about in the current discourse is that I think what it is actually paradoxically doing is setting people up for greater levels of unhappiness. Let me explain why.
First, what we know is that when people focus time and time again on being happier, when they set it as a goal, when they value that idea of being happy there’s a body of research that shows that those individuals over time become less happy. Now why is this? One of the things that I talk about in my book Emotional Agility is the idea that expectations are disappointments waiting to happen. When we overvalue the idea of being happy as a goal we essentially set ourselves up to perceive every slight, every disappointment as a marker of and proof of the fact that we aren’t achieving that goal effectively. So in a very strange way valuing happiness is not ultimately the way to achieve happiness.
A better way to focus on happiness is for us not to be focused on the goal of happiness per se, but rather what it is that we value, what it is that is important to us intrinsically, and how every day we can make moves towards that thing without the overarching expectation being that we will somehow be happier. What happens when we focus intrinsically on what is important to us? Happiness becomes an outstanding byproduct of that focus.
A second concern that I have with the whole happiness movement, “think happy be happy,” is that what it can do is set people up in an internal struggle with themselves. Difficult experiences are a part of life. They are part of life’s contract with the world. They’re part of our contract with the world simply by virtue of being here. Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility. You are healthy until you are not. You are with the people that you love until you are not. You have a job that you love until for some reason that job no longer works out.
It is really important that as human beings we develop our capacity to deal with our thoughts and emotions in a way that isn’t a struggle, in a way that embraces them and is with them and is able to learn from them. What I worry about when there is this message of “be happy” is that people then automatically assume that when they have a difficult thought or feeling that they should push it aside. That it’s somehow a sign of weakness. And what that does is it actually stops people from being authentic with themselves. It hinders our ability to learn from our experience. And I believe that it is stopping us as a society, including our children, from developing higher levels of well-being and resilience.
Myth 2: Happiness is a Choice
One of the unintentional byproducts of the message that we all need to be happy and to choose happiness is at a societal level. There is a very real impact when you are an individual, for example, and you do not have enough money to live in an area that is close to your job. So what you do is you have to move an hour or two hours out of work and you are automatically in a zone where you are less served by public transport. So what we know is that there are systemic policy decisions that in that example will necessarily impact on people’s levels of happiness. There is no denying that when you take two or three hours to get to and from work that your well-being and happiness are impacted.
When we send a message out at a societal level that it is simply up to the individual to choose their happiness, that their happiness is 100 percent fully in their arms and in their power, what we are doing at a society level is inadvertently excusing ourselves from being empathetic, from making policy decisions that might make a meaningful impact to people’s well being and to their happiness. Because when we message to people that happiness is simply in their control, what it does is it excuses our complicity in how people are truly feeling.
Myth 3: Think Positive
A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with and died of stage 4 breast cancer and she described her experience of suffering and loss as being exacerbated by what she termed “the tyranny of positivity.” That she had so many people coming to her and saying just be positive; just think positive; everything will be fine. And what she said is those messages had a real impact on her ability to be authentically and in a real way with her experience. She also said that it made her fairly angry. That if it was just a case of thinking positive and being positive, that all of the individuals in her breast cancer support group would be alive today. They were the most positive people that she had met, but they were not alive.
What it does is it can often lead people who are suffering from illnesses like cancer to feel that they are somehow to blame for their own illness or for their coming death because they weren’t positive enough. I very much experienced this in my own life when I was growing up. My father was diagnosed with cancer when I was 16 years old. And what I noticed on a really large scale interaction when it came to peers and adults was people both saying to my father that he just needed to believe that he would survive. And to us as a family, that we just needed to be positive. And I truly believe that this impacted on our ability to actually connect with and in a real way be with each other during our precious time. Because rather than being able to be present and make space for the reality, we were pegging our hopes on some future cure.