“Introducing Happiness” In the Irish Times

My breezy little book about philosophical approaches to happiness — Introducing Happiness: A Practical Guide — has been out from Icon Books for at least couple of years now, so it is nice to see it being picked up in an article on positive psychology in today’s Irish Times. Here’s the extract:

Similarly, Will Buckingham, author of Introducing Happiness: Big Ideas for Real Life, suggests that national scales of wellbeing can be hijacked by politicians who want a happy electorate without providing the social and economic infrastructure for their citizens. Just consider how Irish people often score highly on happiness scales – even during the recession. Perhaps the questions the positive psychology researchers are asking need to be broadened out to include justice and equality as well as subjective wellbeing.

This isn’t quite my argument: my argument is closer to that of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die, which argues that — at worst — governmental happiness agendas risk making unhappiness a personal moral failing, which absolves governments from a concern with questions of social justice and equality. In other words, we don’t need to fix the problems with massive inequality: you just need to do a bit of meditation or listen to some soothing music. And if you are not happy after that, well you are not trying hard enough. Businesses do this as well, of course (Ehrenreich is good on this), and so do universities: stressed at work? Well, what can you do to improve your well-being? It is not that this is necessarily a poor question. It is that when it becomes the only or the predominant question, then something fishy is going on.

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