happiness

The Promise of Happiness

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:03:00 +0000

In the introduction to her new book The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed asks readers a provocative question: “Do we consent to happiness? And what are we consenting to, if or when we consent to happiness?” Ahmed takes on the elusive topic of happiness not to define it, but to look at how it works. Amazingly, this book does not get trapped in abstraction. Sara Ahmed approaches her critique of happiness with explicitly feminist, anti-racist, and queer analysis, always attentive to the historical moment in which she’s writing. She moves through what she calls an “archive of happiness,” comprised of novels, philosophical treatises, films, utopian proposals, and dystopian visions that all deal in some way with happiness.

In the first chapter, the author reads older European philosophical and psychological accounts of happiness, many of them concerned with the family as a site of happiness. This history of ideas sets the groundwork for the ways in which happiness is constructed in contemporary times. Ahmed introduces the figure of the “affect alien” as a person who challenges the happy family ideal. This figure takes shape in the next three chapters in the form of “feminist killjoys,” “unhappy queers,” and “melancholy migrants.”

These chapters demonstrate how happiness gets used as a form of social control. In looking at how feminists challenge the notion that people are naturally happiest in rigid gender roles, Ahmed writes, “The struggle over happiness forms the political horizon in which feminist claims are made.” Her reading of the classic novel The Well of Loneliness considers how an unhappy ending for a queer main character opens up a possibility for social critique that a “happy” one might not. In her reading of the film Bend It Like Beckham, Ahmed asks why certain kinds of rebellion (say, against one’s immigrant parents) get celebrated in mainstream film while other kinds (say, against British imperialism) don’t. She also recasts the age-old parental plea of “I just want you to be happy,” as a way in which a child is obligated to be happy in order to make the parent happy (a kind of debt).

In concluding chapters, Ahmed cleverly turns her gaze to the future by looking at the varied promises of happiness presented in speculative fiction. Dystopian visions, such as Ursula LeGuin’s short story “The People Who Walked Away from Omelas,” can show how insidiously the happiness of the majority might be used to justify cruelty toward the marginalized. Ahmed acknowledges that positioning happiness as a goal has disturbing implications. She suggests a new approach to living: “...if we no longer presume happiness is our telos, unhappiness would register as more than what gets in the way. When we are no longer sure of what gets in the way, then ‘the way’ itself becomes a question.” In her conclusion, Ahmed uses the word hap (itself so much more buoyant in sound than the heavy happiness) as a way to work through new ideas at the level of language.

Ahmed writes in her introduction, “To kill joy... is to open a life, to make room for possibility, for chance. My aim in this book is to make room.” I think Sara Ahmed succeeds in her project. Fresh in its premises and elegant in its follow-through, with plenty of incisive questions to move it along, The Promise of Happiness offers new lenses on an emotion rarely challenged. I suggest you make room for it on your shelf.

Written by: Vani Natarajan, July 7th 2010

Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Ariel Gore

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

This short but meaningful book is a smart combination of self-help, memoir, and academic study. Gore does not surmise a remedy for the blues, she does not use her life as an anecdote to overcome defeat or as a guiding light toward beatitude, nor does she use statistics and theory to expose her education. Instead, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness is a collection of wise womanhood, the crannies of optimism that are too often ignored.

With eloquent emotional pacing, Gore forms a convincing argument that happiness, particularly among women, has been historically understudied and oversimplified in her academic field. She asks, “How is it that psychology— once envisioned as a great healing art—has gotten to this place where our neuroses are considered so much more valid than our resiliences?” Gore bravely takes on the secret of joy by combining her personal memoirs with history, science, and first person accounts of real women experiencing real happiness. Her words have the contagious effect of positivism without the obnoxious, evangelistic ethos found so often in the self-help aisle. As Gore says herself, “I don't like to think I'm uncomfortable around cheerful people, but there's something of a missionary vibe here that seems odd…”

Perhaps there are so many of these self-help books because their authors know it's not just the ideas, but the time spent thinking about and interpreting those ideas that can actually improve lives. Just like thinking about food can make you hungrier, thinking about happiness can make you happier. If an author can induce self-reflection, they have done their part. Certainly Gore has, as she encourages us individually to use our hearts and minds to actualize a new psychology of happiness.

Using what she calls a "liberation psychology forum," hundreds of women give verbal and written feedback on issues raised by Gore. Combined, these issues allude to the macro question left open throughout the pages: whether we, at this moment, are living our lives. If our answer is no, this book proposes joy as the powerful tool that can give us “the courage to make the universe we dream.”

What Gore does is play hostess at a dinner party with a dozen fascinating women. She introduces us, and in brief encounters we are told stories of happiness, unhappiness, success and defeat. Before you know it the party is over. You drive yourself home without turning on the radio, just thinking, and you lie awake at night because you feel joy—you feel alive.

Written by: Katy Pine, January 19th 2010

Ariel Gore on Women, Happiness, and Self-Determination

admin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:59:00 +0000

Interview with Ariel Gore

Ariel Gore’s new book Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness asks the question, “Can women be smart, empowered, and happy?” Here, Ariel Gore offers her ideas on happiness and advice for women seeking change in their lives.

In order to write this book, you kept a journal where you tracked the things in your life that made you happy, and you asked a lot of other women to do the same. How did these women respond to the request?

At first people were excited about it. Then a lot of them found some resistance to it. Women have a lot of resistance to focusing on their own happiness. We’ve been taught to make other people happy, after all. Most of the women started dealing with feelings of happiness being selfish, and wondering if the journal was hokey. But they had made a commitment to the project and soldiered on. Without fail, they broke through some of those resistances and found that the simple act of meditating on their own happiness allowed it to bloom a little bit. Allowing ourselves to say, “Hey, am I happy?” is powerful and emancipating, even if the process is a bit hokey.

What changes came from keeping the journal?

Some of the women who took part in the original project changed careers. Some increased the amount of time they were spending on whatever activities made them lose track of time: developing pictures in the dark room or surfing or having more sex. One woman made a huge change in her family structure. Other women didn’t make any outward life-changes, but those thirty days exploring happiness and seeing whether we can trace patterns from the scraps of our moods is a practice that’s designed to change us, even if those changes are subtle.

The pursuit of happiness is put forth as the ultimate purpose in life; however, there is also a belief that happy people are, well, sort of dumb. Why does this contradiction exists?

In American culture there has been a massive campaign to sell us all on cheerfulness. It has been an important part of capitalism and has been part of the oppression of women. Women have been endlessly told by others what we need in order to be happy. Maybe they say we need a husband or children or a fantastic career or a spotless kitchen or multiple orgasms. In any case, we are being told what is good for us. Of course we rebel against false cheerfulness and being told what to do when it's wrapped in the nonsense of it being “for our own good.” False happiness and denial-based cheeriness does feel dumb. We have the right to be grumpy! But that’s only fun for a while.

You mention some problems with the concept “you create your own reality,” but ultimately, suggest that is exactly what women must do to achieve happiness. How do you reconcile the contradiction?

Well, we don’t create reality. Women and poor people don’t create reality right now, but we have the freedom in every circumstance to decide how we’re going to react to our reality. As our personal power grows, we learn to influence reality so that we—and everyone—can be free, and happy.

Psychologist Martin Seligman is considered the father of contemporary positive psychology. He made a name for himself back in the late 1960s with a series of experiments on dogs that resulted in the theory of learned helplessness. These dogs were stuck in “shock boxes” and Seligman and his colleagues figured out that if the dogs were shocked at random, and given no control over their torture, they usually didn’t make a run for freedom when given the opportunity. Later, Seligman got to thinking about those rare dogs who, despite abuse and lack of control, kept resisting. There was a rare dog who was so resilient, so totally determined, that she couldn’t be broken. Positive psychology set out to find out, essentially, what that dog had.

If happiness is, in part, a choice based on freedom, what would you tell women who are enmeshed in situations they are powerless to change that cause them great unhappiness?

I think our choices are always limited to some extent. Canadian positive psychologist Dr. Paul T.P. Wong defines happiness as the ability to rejoice in the midst of suffering. Alice Walker has pointed out that resistance is the secret of joy. We make choices first to survive, to protect children and elders, and then to resist false power gained from fear and obedience. No matter what or how long it takes, we get them to open the shock box—or we get it open ourselves—and then we jump.

It is widely**** believed that something that makes you happy or fulfilled will make others happy as well. Why do we fall into this trap?

Because it has been relentlessly marketed to us! If you look at the history of advertising, you find this shift in the early part of the twentieth century—from warning ads that say you will have bad breath if you don’t use this mouthwash to the “product satisfaction ad” where advertisers try to convince us that their product will make us happy by making us more beautiful, more relaxed, richer, or whatever. Tolstoy famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But when I looked at women and happiness, I found the opposite to be true. While depression was fairly standardized, the things that made women happy in their lives were actually quite varied and unique.

As you studied happiness, you realized you wanted another baby and you wanted to make more money, so you made it happen. Did it make you happier?

Stepping out of the role of the martyr-mom by saying, "I want to do all of this, but I need reasonable funding," and then upping my rates for much of the work I do made me happy. Money by itself doesn’t affect my mood one way or the other, but the constant anxiety of not being able to pay the rent was really doing a number on me. I was raised by a Catholic priest who had taken a vow of poverty and in a counterculture community that taught me money was somehow bad, so it took a lot for me to be able to say, "All right, maybe this is the next level of empowerment. Maybe I need to be able to keep a roof over my head and have health insurance for my kids, and the thing is, I can do that without hurting my community."

What one thing do you suggest women do in order to find contentment?

Recording moments of happiness every day can be really powerful, even if—maybe especially if—really hard things are happening in your life. Keeping a happiness journal is about moving through the resistances, savoring moments of happiness even in the most difficult times, and prioritizing your own happiness. It’s not like our refusal to be happy makes us more loving and compassionate; it just makes us mean. Existential depression might seem cool and smart—like we’ve figured out what’s really going on—but in the long term, I don’t think it serves us.

Now that you aren’t experimenting with ways to bring yourself happiness, has your life returned to the status quo?

I have learned how to recognize when something is causing me anxiety, and I can switch gears pretty fast. I recently lost my maternal grandmother and my mother was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. In the span of one season, I went from feeling secure as a granddaughter and a daughter to facing the possibility of being the eldest generation in my family. I’ve had to take a deep breath and come to terms with not being a kid anymore. I cannot afford to waste the finite amount of time I have on this earth listening to anybody’s bullshit, and I can't afford to lock myself in the basement in existential depression.

Written by: Jessica Powers, January 19th 2010

The "Happy" Collection

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:19:00 +0000

By LUSH

As if anyone needs an excuse to spend more time under a hot shower—well, here's another, or five others—each a more compelling reason to recreationally cleanse. LUSH produces fresh, hand-made cruelty-and-lard-free and frequently vegan personal care products. All bathbombs, gels, soaps, shampoos, and other innovative items are individually made by skilled suds people—Sara, Czarina, and Reggie contributed to my 'happy' package. They offer over ten score individual products—currently made and sold within four months, or available online as 'retro'—have their own superhero in a bright green leotard, and like baby harp seals.

Seeing that Clorox owns Burt's Bees, Estee Lauder owns Aveda, L'Oreal owns the Body Shop, Unilever owns Ben & Jerry's, and Cadbury's owns Green & Black, it's refreshing to find a small, organic-product organization that appears to own their own. As Billie Holiday sang, “... God bless the child.” This kid was happy to lather with the 'Happy Hippy' shower gel—the bodywashes also work as shampoos, and LUSH sells some shampoos as bars in a mission to keep packaging to a minimum. Over two-thirds of their products are unwrapped and unboxed, and one of their news releases posits that if twenty percent of the United States population started using solid shampoo, twenty-two million plastic bottles would be removed from landfills.

I did stockpile some buy-one-get-one hair cleansers and products, but once they're depleted, if I need an ecologically sound rationalization for self-care, there's another, not to mention that the bracing citrus scents in this set made me—well, if not happy, at least punctured existential malaise and effectively combated ennui. I wonder if they have an enlightening moisturizer or helpful hand lotion?

Gift set pictured is foot care collection. The Happy Collection is another combination of products.

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, July 2nd 2009