The Happiness Industry Read online

  In which case, why build such an apparatus of measurement? Why go to such lengths to ensure that the various separate bits of it are joined up, connecting our bank balances to our bodies, our facial expressions to our shopping habits, and so on? Under the auspices of scientific optimism, we are being governed by a philosophy that makes no real sense. It is unable to specify, finally, whether happiness is something physical or metaphysical. Every time it is asserted as the former, it slips away again. Yet the apparatus of measurement keeps on growing, creeping further into our personal and social lives.

  The Copenhagen tenant who kicked the JWT researcher down the flight of stairs in 1927 saw this for what it is: a strategy of power. The surveillance, management and government of our feelings is successful to the extent that it neutralizes alternative ways of understanding human beings and alternative forms of political and economic representation. This project will never reach its destination. Despite claims by neuroscientists to be crossing ‘final frontiers’ regarding decision-making or emotions, the search for the ‘objective’ reality of our feelings will keep being dashed, and keep extending further. The main thing is that if unhappiness can be expressed via instruments of measurement, if success can be understood in terms of quantifiable outcomes, then critical and emancipatory projects are ensnared, and their energies are harnessed.

  Utilitarianism can sanction virtually any type of policy solution in pursuit of mental optimization, including quasi-socialist forms of organization and production on a small scale, where they appear to make people feel better and healthier. It favours human ‘flourishing’ in an open-ended, humanistic sense, which may be achieved through friendship and altruism, as recommended by positive psychologists. But if a definition of optimization were offered which included control over one’s circumstances and one’s time, a voice that exerted power over decision-making, and a sense of autonomy that wasn’t reducible to neural or psychological causality, this simply would not be computable. Such an idea of human fulfilment, in which each individual speaks her mind rather than reveals it unwittingly, where unhappiness is a basis for critique and reform rather than for treatment, and where mind–body problems are simply forgotten rather than targeted through relentless medical research, points towards a different form of politics altogether.

  There are a number of critical psychologists over the years who have sought to point this out, by stressing how mental illness is entangled with disempowerment. There are plenty of inspiring ventures and experiments which seek to give people hope partly through restoring their say over their own lives. There are also businesses which do not rely on behavioural science to manage and sell to people. These scattered alternatives are all parts of some larger alternative, which correctly understood might even be a better recipe for happiness.

  8

  Critical Animals

  It has long been understood that working outdoors has certain psychological and emotional benefits, especially when it involves tending nature. Gardening can prove helpful in alleviating depression, and there is evidence to suggest that the presence of foliage directly lifts an individual’s mood. When the British Office for National Statistics produced its first official data on ‘national well-being’, it concluded that the happiest residents of the UK were those living in remote and beautiful parts of Scotland, while the happiest workers were those managing forests.1 Some researchers have even suggested that the colour green has positive psychological effects.2

  There is a long history of putting mentally troubled people to work on farms. The routines of milking, tilling and harvesting offer their own form of normality for those who cannot cope with the normality offered in society at large. People who can’t seem to find coherence in their own lives, can’t relate to a conventional job, or have suffered some brutal emotional rupture, discover that the presence of plants and animals has a calming influence. The harshness of agricultural life may sometimes be part of its value. Crops fail, weather turns bad, but the only plausible response is to laugh and collectively have another go. Neither individual glory nor individual blame are appropriate, in strong contrast to the ethos of twenty-first-century neoliberalism.

  In the early 2000s, Beren Aldridge was looking to establish a farm of this sort in Cumbria, in Britain’s Lake District. Aldridge had worked on a ‘care farm’ in America for a year and had experience working in mental health services in Cumbria. He identified farming as an obvious gap in the forms of mental health provision that were available and set about making the case to the regional development agency and various charitable trusts. Funding was agreed, and in 2004, Growing Well was established, a ten-acre farm producing vegetables that are sold locally. Volunteers can spend as little as half a day a week working on the farm, to help them recover from a variety of mental and emotional difficulties.

  Judged from the perspective of funders, policy-makers and mental health experts, Growing Well has been a great success. Evaluations have shown that those who spend time working at the farm experience clear improvements in their conditions, which tend to be more sustainable than the improvements offered by medicalized forms of treatment. Initially, most of the people who came to Growing Well had been referred there by social services and social care practitioners. But with the emergence of ‘social prescribing’ as a recognized medical practice, Growing Well has also been able to forge relationships with doctor’s practices around the north-west of England. By 2013, 130 volunteers had spent time working at the farm.

  How should we make sense of the success of something like Growing Well? If one chooses to view the human mind or brain as some magically autonomous entity, with its own strange habits, tastes, fluctuations and dysfunctions, which we as human beings have to look after (with the assistance of managers, doctors and policy-makers), then the story is relatively obvious. People are occasionally victims of a spontaneous mental or neurological affliction which they are powerless to fix. Perhaps some neuron isn’t firing properly. Perhaps a bad mix of hormones has been released into their blood, due to stress factors which they should have avoided. Maybe they haven’t managed their happiness effectively enough, through diet, exercise and empathy towards others. The natural environment and physical activity offers a psychosomatic treatment for these sorts of ailment, not unlike a drug or a talking cure.

  No doubt this is the sort of story that many of Growing Well’s funders and NHS collaborators would tell. It is certainly the sort of story that has captured the imagination of policy-makers and managers today. And in the face of a constant drip-drip of neurological and behaviourist research findings into the mainstream media (or via self-help literature), it is the sort of story that individuals may now tell about their own lives. My brain has developed a dysfunction which requires a treatment. My mind has started playing up, like an errant dog. Spending time with plants becomes a medical fix. After all, as positive psychologists relentlessly remind us, well-being is a choice. Someone needs to take my mind or brain in hand.

  But this is very different from how Beren Aldridge understands the project he founded. As far as he is concerned, Growing Well is a business, not some form of medical prescription in disguise. Prior to establishing the farm, Aldridge had done a master’s degree in vocational rehabilitation, studying how work helps people recover from illnesses and painful life events. His dissertation looked at participatory management practices, exploring the benefits of democratic business structures, otherwise known as co-operatives. It struck him that including people in the running of businesses – be they social enterprises or not – was an obvious way of helping them rediscover a sense of purpose and agency in their own lives. Why not bring together the movement for ‘care farming’, which had traditionally been viewed as a service to mental health patients, with that of cooperatives, which offered a template for empowering people to organize and produce collectively?

  Virtually all the scientific analysis of the psychological effects of spending time with plants completely ignores why a person might
do so. Gardening and harvesting become merely therapeutic. The relationship between foliage and mood is represented as a simple one of cause and effect. The ethos of Growing Well is entirely different from this. Its organizing principle is that volunteers share the same purpose, of producing and selling good vegetables. The farm is established as an ‘industrial and provident society’, one of the legal forms available for the creation of co-operatives in the UK. Anyone who has an interest in Growing Well, be it as a customer, a volunteer or a visitor wanting to know more about farming, is encouraged to become a member, who is then able to participate in decision-making. Volunteers are offered the opportunity to engage in management of the business, at whatever level of seniority they would like. This isn’t just about ‘working with your hands’; it is also about expressing a view and taking some control.

  The agencies funding Growing Well, and the doctors referring patients to volunteer there, have one theory as to what is going on. Aldridge and his colleagues have another one entirely. According to the former, the volunteers are medically ill and receiving a form of treatment. According to the latter, they are rediscovering their dignity, exercising judgement, and participating in a business which trades successfully in the local area. In the first theory, the volunteers are passive, without any medically relevant interpretation of their own of their situation. In the second theory, they are active and gaining opportunities to influence the world around them, through interpreting and debating it.

  Could it not be that both views are correct? In a superficial sense, it could. People can maintain different ideas of what is going on, based on different types of evidence and scientific methodology. The more fundamental question is what it means for society, for politics or for personal life stories, to operate according to certain forms of psychological and neurological explanation. A troubling possibility is that it is precisely the behaviourist and medical view of the mind – as some sort of internal bodily organ or instrument which suffers silently – that locks us into the forms of passivity associated with depression and anxiety in the first place. A society designed to measure and manage fluctuations in pleasure and pain, as Bentham envisaged, may be set up for more instances of ‘mental breakdown’ than one designed to help people speak and participate.

  Understanding unhappiness

  Why do people become unhappy, and what should anyone do about it? These are questions which concern philosophers, psychologists, politicians, neuroscientists, managers, economists, activists and doctors alike. How one sets about answering such questions will depend heavily on what sorts of theories and interpretations one employs. A sociologist will offer different types of answers from a neuroscientist, who will offer different types of answers again from a psychoanalyst. The question of how we explain and respond to human unhappiness is ultimately an ethical and political one, of where we choose to focus our critique and, to be blunt about it, where we intend to level the blame.

  Beren Aldridge’s insight, on which the structure and ethos of Growing Well is based, is an important one. Treating the mind (or brain) as some form of decontextualized, independent entity that breaks down of its own accord, requiring monitoring and fixing by experts, is a symptom of the very culture that produces a great deal of unhappiness today. Disempowerment is an integral part of how depression, stress and anxiety arise. And despite the best efforts of positive psychologists, disempowerment occurs as an effect of social, political and economic institutions and strategies, not of neural or behavioural errors. To deny this is to exacerbate the problem for which happiness science claims to be the solution.

  Beyond the various behaviourist and utilitarian disciplines that have been explored in this book, there are a number of research traditions which share this focus on disempowerment. The community psychology tradition, which emerged in the United States during the 1960s, insists that individuals can only be understood within their social contexts. Clinical psychologists have been among the most outspoken critics of the medicalization of distress, and the role of the pharmaceutical companies in encouraging it. Allied to a critique of capitalism, these psychologists – such as David Smail and Mark Rapley in the UK – have offered alternative interpretations of psychiatric symptoms, based on a more sociological and political understanding of unhappiness.3 Social epidemiology, as practised by Carles Muntaner in Canada or Richard Wilkinson in the UK, tries to understand how mental disorders vary across different societies and different social classes, correlating with different socioeconomic conditions.

  At various points in history, these more sociological approaches even found their way into the thinking of business. As Chapter 3 explored, there was a period during the 1930s and 1940s when market research acquired a quasi-democratic dimension, seeking to discover what the public wanted from and thought about the world. Sociologists, statisticians and socialists became instrumental to how the attitudes of the public were represented. As Chapter 4 discussed, the emphasis which management came to put on teamwork, health and enthusiasm from the 1930s onwards has occasionally produced more radical analyses which highlight the importance of collective power and voice in the workplace as contributing factors to productivity and well-being. This potentially points towards whole new models of organization, and not simply new techniques of management.

  At each point in the history of happiness measurement, from the Enlightenment through to the present, hopes for a different social and economic world flicker into view, as unhappiness becomes a basis to challenge the status quo. Understanding the strains and pains that work, hierarchy, financial pressures and inequality place upon human well-being is a first step to challenging those things. This emancipatory spirit flips swiftly into a conservative one, once the same body of evidence is used as a basis to judge the behaviour and mentality of people, rather than the structure of power. Hope is not so much dashed as ensnared. Critique is turned inwards. This is not necessarily how things have to be.

  Once the critical eye is turned upon institutions, and away from the emotion or mood of the individual who inhabits them, things start to look very different indeed. Among wealthy nations, the rate of mental illness correlates very closely to the level of economic inequality across society as a whole, with the United States at the top.4 The nature and availability of work plays a crucial role in influencing mental well-being, as do organizational structures and managerial practices. One of the most important findings in happiness economics is that unemployment exerts a far more negative effect on people psychologically than the mere loss of earnings would suggest.5

  Meanwhile, types of work where individuals have no ‘skill discretion’ or ‘decision authority’ have been repeatedly found to trigger the release of cortisol into the blood, which leads to hardening of arteries and heightened risk of heart disease.6 It is scarcely surprising that employee well-being is higher in employee-owned companies, where decision-making is more participatory and authority more distributed, than in regular, shareholder-owned firms.7 In their extensive analysis of how recessions affect public health, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu demonstrate the precise ways in which austerity policies have led to deteriorating mental and physical health, and unnecessary deaths.8 They also indicate alternatives in which recessions can be an opportunity for improvements in public health. Which route is chosen is ultimately a political question.

  While economists and policy-makers focus only on whether or not an individual has work or not, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the structure and purpose of an organization are crucial to its psychological and physiological effects on employees. For instance, people find work more fulfilling in not-for-profit organizations than in private businesses, leading to lower stress levels.9 To view work as some contributor to well-being, as policy-makers now tend to do, without considering the purpose of work, is to fall into the behaviourist fallacy of viewing people as lab rats, just with slightly more developed ‘verbal behaviour’.

  Research on advertising and materialist aspiration o
ffers an equally compelling critique. Led by the American psychologist Tim Kasser, a range of studies has looked at how materialist values correlate to happiness, and repeatedly tells the same troubling story. Business school students who have strongly internalized materialist values (that is, of measuring their own worth in terms of money) report lower levels of happiness and self-actualization than those who haven’t.10 Individuals who spend their money in obsessive ways – either too cautiously or too loosely – have been discovered to suffer from lower levels of well-being.11 And materialism and social isolation have been shown to be mutually reinforcing: lonely people seek material goods more compulsively, while materialist individuals are more at risk of loneliness.12

  Advertising and marketing play a crucial role in sustaining these negative spirals; indeed they (and their paymasters) have a clear economic interest in doing so. If consumption and materialism remain both cause and effect of individualistic, unhappy cultures, then the vicious circle is a profitable one for those involved in marketing. The precise role of advertising in the propagation of materialist values is disputed, although research does at the very least confirm that the two have risen in tandem with one another.13

  None of the research cited here is especially surprising, and much of it has attracted a great deal of discussion in the mainstream media. What it all ultimately comes down to is the question of how power is distributed in society and in the economy. Where individuals feel buffeted by forces over which they have no influence – be that managerial discretion, financial insecurity, images of bodily perfection, relentless performance measures, the constant experiments of social media platforms, the diktats of well-being gurus – they will not only find it harder to achieve contentment in their lives, but they will also be at much greater risk of suffering some more drastic breakdown. As Muntaner’s research has shown, those at the bottom of the income scale are most vulnerable in this respect. Trying to maintain a stable family while income is unpredictable and work is insecure is among the most stressful things a person can do. No politician should be permitted to stand up and talk about mental health or stress, without also clarifying where they stand on the issue of economic precariousness of the most vulnerable people in society.