America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, by Ruth Whippman
St. Martin's Press
Cultural Commentary
★★★★★/5

With All That Yoga, Mindfulness, and Gratitude Practice, Why Aren't Wealthy Americans Happier?

Because they're too focused on becoming happy to actually be it.
This book is a fun one. When Ruth Whippman's husband was offered a job in Silicon Valley, the whole family – which also included baby Solomon – moved from England to the US – or, more specifically, to the prosperous yogalands of Northern California where the streets are paved with kale and feeling good is almost as obligatory as paying taxes. At least, that's how she describes it.

What she finds in her new home are people who are a.) obsessed with being happy, and b.) working so hard to fulfill that goal that they have made themselves lonely, anxious, and a imbued with a sense that they have failed when they don't find it.

Whippman presents herself as a bemused outsider, a wry anthropologist exploring the contradictions of a culture with which she has some sympathy. It is this engaging character that drives the narrative, and makes it worth reading to the end. The book begins with her efforts to adapt to her new home, then takes her on a journey through a number of happiness-seeking communities. She visits Salt Lake City to explore the fresh, shiny, suspiciously well-adjusted happiness that Mormons often exude. She takes a Landmark seminar and surveys the world of self-help, looks at the decidedly difficult terrain of happiness in social media, and takes on positive psychology.
What she finds is a basic irony about the search for happiness in the US: it comes easiest, she writes, when people feel connected to their friends, families, communities, and co-workers. And yet, the central message that keeps coming through is this, taken from the Happiness for Dummies website: "Just as money can’t make you happy, other people can’t make you happy either." (p. 17)

And this is a problem. Since happiness has become everyone's own personal responsibility, she writes, Americans have begun to seek it within themselves as individuals instead of looking for ways to create a happier society for all, or through stronger relationships with a few loved ones.

The Search for Happiness

The solitary practice of meditation is fine, she says – although she doesn't really give it enough of a try to experience the longer-term benefits – but she thinks time spent with other people is a better investment. She raises the issue in her comments about Dan Harris's book, 10% Happier, about the improvement he experienced once he started meditating. In the acknowledgements section Harris thanks his wife, who made him "100% happier before I was 10% happier." In her incisive, pungent, witty voice, Whippman point out that this "begs the question as to whether he might have seen a ten times higher happiness return from spending his vacation time with her instead." (p.22)

This makes only half of a valid point; Whippman doesn't leave much space for the value people can take from solitary happiness practices. Americans may have gone too far into individual practices, as she argues, but she underplays the possibility that things like mindfulness and gratitude can be sources of happiness as well.

At the same time, Whippman is subtle enough to recognize that community has its limits in providing happiness. She visits Salt Lake City and spends a week with a family of Mormons who really seem to have it together. They are wrapped in the strong embrace of a community that offers a great deal of support in exchange for a great deal of conformity. Eventually, she finds herself wondering whether this level of conformity is worth it. At a bridal shower, as she circulates among a number of women, she finds that "[t]he conversations I am having are giving me the uncanny impression of a movie in which a series of different actresses play the same character at different ages and stages of life." (p. 146)

Nonconformity comes at a steep price. She talks to people who don't fit in: a feminist who is torn between valuing her connections and community, and desiring to be treated as an equal; a gay man who can't resolve the tension between his sexual needs and the Mormon demand for homosexual celibacy. For people who fit in, Whippman explains, that Mormon embrace can be wonderful. For those who don't, it can be strangling.

The Big Blind Spot

Over the course of the book, the message about the need for community and the stress caused by the individual search for happiness comes to feel a bit repetitive. But the book takes a sharp turn near the end, where Whippman explores and critiques positive psychology. Long-time proponents of the individualistic search for happiness, there are strong connections between positive psychology and the Templeton Foundation, an institution lead, until recently, by a billionaire-philanthropist with a long history of supporting right-wing causes. Whippman finds that the positive-psychological causes that have been funded best are those which place the onus for happiness on the individual "with no attempt to even consider how social justice or systematic policy change might influence well-being. Right out of the gate," she explains, "this has set the terms and intellectual scope of the discussion." (p. 202)

It is refreshing (but not surprising) that Whippman hasn't jumped on the positive psychology bandwagon. Instead of accepting positive psychology's conclusions at face-value, she examines that neo-liberal orientation, and interviews someone on the other side, who believes who believes that circumstances matter more than the positive thinking positive psychologists recommend. Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, tells her, "Positive thinking isn’t just useless, it’s counterproductive to my self-esteem… It makes things worse. You cannot kick me and expect me to say thank you for kicking me with a smile on my face.” (p. 203)

Whippman then allows the activist to make the case against positive psychology:

They think, if they can just make people a little more chipper about being oppressed. Problem is, if you just ignore all the hard shit in your life, you’ll never change anything. It’s a way of making the poor bovine. [p. 204]

The author suggests an antidote to the individualistic path that so many Americans seem to have been convinced to walk. Throughout the book – steadily but not pedantically – Whippman presents evidence that show that Americans have become increasingly isolated from one another, and, in contrast with America's culture of individualism, points to the ways that other advanced societies foster a sense of community and belonging.

Whippman presents a strong argument to explain why so many well-to-do Americans experience a happiness gap – but where, exactly, did this come from? That question goes beyond the scope of this book. How did the people most able to live out the promise of "the pursuit of happiness" end up having so much difficulty getting there?

I, for one, would gladly read that sequel.

 

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