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A review by leelee_draws_pictures
The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being by William Davies
3.0
What if, instead of working on our own selfish happiness, we should be focusing our unhappiness outward — at the way society is unfolding? Most, specifically, the uneven distribution of wealth and the lack of a voice in the world’s proceedings?
This is the basic premise of this book, which looks at the history of, and current emphasis on, happiness research.
The first 30% of the book is dry, but if you plug through the historical figures, you’ll find a lot of gems. There are a lot of facts to support the notion that society needs “happy” citizens in order to continue running “smoothly.”
Depression, and other mental illness, costs our unjust society a lot of money. The people in power are concerned about finding it and rooting it out, because a depressed person is not a big spender. A depressed person does not have the energy to play the game. People who are “mentally withdrawn from their jobs… cost the US economy as much as $550 billion a year. Disengagement is believed to manifest itself in absenteeism, sickness, and — sometimes more problematic — presenteeism, in which employees come to the office purely to be physically present. A Canadian study suggests that over a quarter of workplace absence is due to general burn-out, rather than sickness.”
The antidepressant industry, the DSM, and the APA are, according to this book, very close friends. Drug companies helped qualify depression as a “disease” so the FDA would approve of medicines (its drugs) to treat it. General unhappiness at life became diagnosable as “depression,” to be treated with antidepressants, which are able to selectively attack the brain in a way that is not fully understood. “Nobody has ever discovered precisely how or why they work, to the extent that they do.”
But they work, and they ease the pain of being part of the 99%. “Relative poverty — being poor in comparison to others — can cause as much misery as absolute poverty, suggesting that it is the sense of inferiority and status anxiety that triggers depression, in addition to the stress of worrying about money. For this reason, the effect of inequality on depression is felt much of the way up the income scale.”
According to this book, we are being studied by marketers and psychologists who are keeping the machine running smoothly. There is a project underway, “at University of Warwick, UK, [that] has used real suicide notes to teach computers how to spot suicidal thoughts within grammatical construction.” Is that protective — or invasive? The more we voluntarily share about ourselves on the Internet, the easier it is for those gathering the information to influence us. Rage at Facebook’s algorithms and privacy violations “is a symptom of a more general anxiety regarding technologies of psychological control.”
I am having difficulty telling whether the author is paranoid, but the arguments he makes are compelling, and well-researched, and I will be thinking of this book for a while.
This is the basic premise of this book, which looks at the history of, and current emphasis on, happiness research.
The first 30% of the book is dry, but if you plug through the historical figures, you’ll find a lot of gems. There are a lot of facts to support the notion that society needs “happy” citizens in order to continue running “smoothly.”
Depression, and other mental illness, costs our unjust society a lot of money. The people in power are concerned about finding it and rooting it out, because a depressed person is not a big spender. A depressed person does not have the energy to play the game. People who are “mentally withdrawn from their jobs… cost the US economy as much as $550 billion a year. Disengagement is believed to manifest itself in absenteeism, sickness, and — sometimes more problematic — presenteeism, in which employees come to the office purely to be physically present. A Canadian study suggests that over a quarter of workplace absence is due to general burn-out, rather than sickness.”
The antidepressant industry, the DSM, and the APA are, according to this book, very close friends. Drug companies helped qualify depression as a “disease” so the FDA would approve of medicines (its drugs) to treat it. General unhappiness at life became diagnosable as “depression,” to be treated with antidepressants, which are able to selectively attack the brain in a way that is not fully understood. “Nobody has ever discovered precisely how or why they work, to the extent that they do.”
But they work, and they ease the pain of being part of the 99%. “Relative poverty — being poor in comparison to others — can cause as much misery as absolute poverty, suggesting that it is the sense of inferiority and status anxiety that triggers depression, in addition to the stress of worrying about money. For this reason, the effect of inequality on depression is felt much of the way up the income scale.”
According to this book, we are being studied by marketers and psychologists who are keeping the machine running smoothly. There is a project underway, “at University of Warwick, UK, [that] has used real suicide notes to teach computers how to spot suicidal thoughts within grammatical construction.” Is that protective — or invasive? The more we voluntarily share about ourselves on the Internet, the easier it is for those gathering the information to influence us. Rage at Facebook’s algorithms and privacy violations “is a symptom of a more general anxiety regarding technologies of psychological control.”
I am having difficulty telling whether the author is paranoid, but the arguments he makes are compelling, and well-researched, and I will be thinking of this book for a while.