This is still the New World. For my final edit desk, I wanted to write about something happy. Circumstance doesn’t matter. It can be used to treat anxiety. People were agonizing over it. Re: America's obsession with happiness Quote ...The authors of these studies concluded that, paradoxically, the more people valued and were encouraged to value happiness as a separate life goal, the less happy they were. I have been living in the U.S. for almost two years, and the majority of my time has been spent at Lehigh. Every person feels it is important to be happy. The culture tends to blame women for life’s problems. The World Health Organization says the United States is the third most anxious country in the world. Americans spend more time and money looking for happiness than any other nation on earth. What got you interested in America’s obsession with happiness? It’s one of the things you can get in America if the place doesn’t kill you first. Suicide rates and self-harm are up. Whippman doesn’t think America’s happiness obsession is simply misguided—she believes it’s actually potentially toxic, a form of gaslighting wherein people are made to … They pushed positive thinking, self-help groups, mindfulness, gratitude journals, yoga and so on. It made me come to the conclusion that the main problems people have won’t be solved by just having better technology. Whippman: Obviously these are all ancient practices, and yoga is a little different, because a lot of people do that for exercise. Juanito Moralejo, ’20, is an international student at Lehigh, and he believes a lot of people in his home country of Guatemala are happy without material items. Corruption, social distrust, and the difficulties of navigating life without a basic social safety net all certainly contribute to America's lackluster performance in the happiness stakes. Whippman: Yes, absolutely. America is obsessed with happiness — and it’s making us miserable A Brit on life in America: “The pursuit of happiness” has gotten out of hand. Here’s how to cope with ‘Election Stress Disorder.’. Whippman: Happiness is an instinctive human desire. Whippman: Several years ago, my husband was offered a job with a start-up in Silicon Valley. We crave a feeling rather than the actual life achievement itself. It’s our obsession with happiness, and the never-ending quest for it, that causes us the trouble. Her work has appeared in the Week, New York Magazine, the Baffler, LA Review of Books, Washington City Paper, BuzzFeed and more. All I’ve got there is Ben Franklin, Mr. Get-Ahead himself. We are not, she maintains, any happier for trying so hard. Q: Can you talk a little bit about your critiques of popular practices, like yoga, meditation, and mindfulness, which are based in Eastern philosophies? The effect of having an obsession with happiness is visible on college campuses. Over and over, we are told that the thing standing between our dissatisfied current self and our blissed-out future self is us. Self-helpery and self-improvement as the road to Happiness goes all the way back in this country. (If you want to see how really crazy, have a look at how we deal, or don’t deal, with death.) Photography Videos The Goods Press Room TIME Guide to Happiness. Happiness is fantastic. You can’t write a whole book on happiness without thinking about your own happiness an awful lot. And where there is no royal court or church, but there is disdain for intellectualism and arts, the marker of success for those who worry about such things will be money. I don’t know where it came from.) A new popular health consciousness seems to be emerging constantly in the United States. We’re competing to beat the odds.We think we must work harder an… Our son was a year old at the time and knew about 10 words. It’s been less than 250 years since the country was established. So I started to report what makes for a happy life. They see it as being normal to have a range of emotions that may vary depending on what’s happening in their life. There is a natural inclination among women to try to improve themselves and their lives, which isn’t a bad thing. Whippman: No, though social media does have its positive side. What’s changed is the definition of happiness from “all is well and pleasing” to “I am bursting with ecstasy at every moment”, a relatively new idea that I expect will fade as the Boomer grip on the culture fades. The fact that America’s dog obsession took off in the go-go 1950s and 1960s supports that. We associate weight loss with success. However, I never got a smile back. Re: America's obsession with happiness I don't really think there is an equivalence to be made as white privilege and institutional racism are things that actually exist, even if some people might call them out when they're not there or ignore intersectionality and … For a long time, I was lonely in America. This is so very true. That day it all clicked — everyone in America is obsessed with being happy. It’s inherently a bad, negative, stigmatized concept (refer again to those scary statistics above). When I went back home to Pakistan this past summer, I couldn’t help but notice I had picked up the habit of smiling whenever I looked at a stranger. We are a self-conscious nation. For the latest in our blog series, Inspiring Reads, we interviewed Whippman, who also revealed the actual secret to a fulfilled life. 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