happy smiley people

What is worse than the sullen, pretentious, pseudo-depressed fashionable moping around of the ill-spirited ones? Give me, feed me, Pasolini, Bergman, "realism"...dress it up as "existential angst" or rebellion against the superficiality of 'the bourgeoisie', the triviality of consumer society. Dark, and deep, the un-nameable, mysterious gnostic soul that fears symmetry, order, allegiance, that finds meaning, authenticity, in sickness and alienation. Pain & Suffering are real; they alone are profound. Already half-dead before you've even lived!

Well, perhaps only the smiley happy people, the boring, sickly-sweet dullards, with their Christian-Muslim moronic pamphlet-induced morality; the nice brigade, the flatlanders, the insipidly virtuous do-gooders cowering behind their picket fences and family life who want to talk about "life" and "positive thinking". Fuck, the whole world's American now! And have a nice day!

What counts as health, a good constitution, strength nowadays?

The strange thing is that the world bank wallahs and the economists/economic historians have noticed something quite peculiar: it doesn't work!

As societies grow richer they don't necessarily become any happier. Put to one side, dear reader, your scepticism as to whether happiness can even be measured, and your concerns about why happiness should be a way of evaluating how good an individual's life is going (why not freedom, say?); put to one side your profound queries about the social choice problem: namely: how do you aggregate across different individuals in society to get an idea of how good a society as a whole is doing? I mean, even assuming that one can make inter-personal comparisons of subjective well-being (happiness) what is tis notion of overall happiness? The greatest sum of the greatest number or the happiness of the least happy? Or perhaps greater social happiness occurs in a society where happiness is more equally distributed.

What's going on?

1. As average standards of living improve you think you need to have even more income, more goods, just to be at the same position you were before: the hedonic treadmill. The people in rich countries are not much happier than they were at the end of WWII. Great expectations,
and ever greater (and more frequent) disappointments. Looking for a partner: shop around. Fish.


2. Even if your income does grow but it doesn't grow as fast as that of those in your peer group then you're screwed. Rivalry.

3. The constant effort to acquire more and more may mean that you miss out on other things, things that you actually value-both intrinsically, and instrumentally in happiness terms: family life, trust (social capital!), a relaxed state of mind, peace, time (time is not money!). So, diminshing returns to income.

Self-help. Get help. Always the same individualised 'solution', a solution that itself has become a commodity and is relentlessly marketed. If you're unhappy, it's your fault, bud. That means never look at the capitalist system itself, how it generates, has to generate, this ceaseless stream of desires. The success of capitalism, comrade, depends on the promise of happiness, of it always being just around the corner. The pursuit of happiness as a fundamental right. A right, for Christ's sake!