We have all seen advertisements depicting airbrushed people beaming a smile while holding or using a product, but life is not manicured and we are not happy.
If these statements are true then why have we subscribed to what corporations want us to think supplies happiness?
A happy populace is a passive and malleable entity, and deep down we all just want to be happy.
However, we have taken the easy road to happiness.
We are presented with the idea that consumption produces happiness, and we have fallen for that lie because it’s easy and does not require any introspection or questions.
In his book The Happiness Industry William Davies explores the idea of why, and how, the corporatization of happiness is affecting us.
“The relentless fascination with quantities of subjective feeling can only possibly divert critical attention away from broader political and economic problems,” Davies argues. “Happiness science is critique turned inwards.”
This compulsory happiness is not a coincidence by any means, but rather a strategic component of capitalism itself. Managers and corporations are lying and manipulating you, and not in a good way. It’s advertising and we deserve better.
Terry Eagleton, a literary critic for The Guardian, wrote a review of Davies’ book.
“What matters in the narcissistic world of late capitalism is not what you think or do, but how you feel. And since how you feel can’t be argued against, it is conveniently insulated from all debate,” Eagleton wrote. “Men and women can now stroll around in continuous self-monitoring mode, using apps to track their changes of mood. The brutal, domineering ego of an older style of capitalism has given way to the tender self-obsession of the new.”
Plato argued that happiness isn’t the mere pursuit of pleasure, but rather a pursuit of justice and virtue.
The person who attempts to find happiness through possessions or pleasures is not truly happy because deep down their conscious creates internal conflict.
In particular millennials have fallen prey to the idea that we have to cultivate a brand for ourselves: that our self-worth derives from how other people perceive us, even people online that we have never even met.
We are in a world that has trained its people to be self-conscious.
In his 2016 stand-up comedy special Make Happy musical comedian, Bo Burnham, talked about how social media feeds into our perception of the self.
“They say it’s the ‘me’ generation. It’s not. The arrogance is taught or it was cultivated. It’s self-conscious. That’s what it is, it’s conscious of self. Social media is just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said ‘Here, perform everything, to each other, all the time for no reason.’ It’s prison, it’s horrific,” Burnham said. “What do we want more than to lie in bed at the end of the day and just watch our lives as a satisfied audience member? I know very little about anything, but what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience you should do it.”
All we want is that hit of dopamine, a chemical the brain secretes that triggers pleasure, every time someone hits the like button on our social media posts.
I know this is hard to accept and that you will not want to accept it, but the simple truth is that the corporatization of happiness has culminated into a toxic society that refuses to think for itself.
Why think for yourself when it’s painful and means recognizing that we are a fundamentally broken society?
George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and many great writers have presented what could happen if we allow corporations and the government to control what we think, and if they are right then we are headed towards the end of free thought.
You can go back to sleep now.