NAMED ONE OF THE 40 BEST BOOKS OF 2016 BY THE NEW YORK POST
A New York Times Editor’s Choice pick
“Ruth Whippman is my new favorite cultural critic…a shrewd, hilarious analysis.” ―Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B (coauthored with Sheryl Sandberg)
“I don’t think I’ve enjoyed cultural observations this much since David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Reading this book is like touring America with a scary-smart friend who can’t stop elbowing you in the ribs and saying, “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?!” If you want to understand why our culture incites pure dread and alienation in so many of us (often without always recognizing it), read this book.” ―Heather Havrilesky, writer behind “Ask Polly” for New York Magazine and nationally bestselling author of How to Be a Person in the World
Are you happy? Right now? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could you be happier if you tried harder?
After she packed up her British worldview (that most things were basically rubbish) and moved to America, journalist and documentary filmmaker Ruth Whippman found herself increasingly perplexed by the American obsession with one topic above all others: happiness. The subject came up everywhere: at the playground swings, at the meat counter in the supermarket, and even―legs in stirrups―at the gynecologist.
The omnipresence of these happiness conversations (trading tips, humble-bragging successes, offering unsolicited advice) wouldn’t let her go, and so Ruth did some digging. What she found was a paradox: despite the fact that Americans spend more time and money in search of happiness than any other nation on earth, research shows that the United States is one of the least contented, most anxious countries in the developed world. Stoked by a multi-billion dollar “happiness industrial complex” intent on selling the promise of bliss, America appeared to be driving itself crazy in pursuit of contentment.
So Ruth set out to get to the bottom of this contradiction, embarking on an uproarious pilgrimage to investigate how this national obsession infiltrates all areas of life, from religion to parenting, the workplace to academia. She attends a controversial self-help course that promises total transformation, where she learns all her problems are all her own fault; visits a “happiness city” in the Nevada desert and explores why it has one of the highest suicide rates in America; delves into the darker truths behind the influential academic “positive psychology movement”; and ventures to Utah to spend time with the Mormons, officially America’s happiest people.
What she finds, ultimately, and presents in America the Anxious, is a rigorously researched yet universal answer, and one that comes absolutely free of charge.
Product Features
- America the Anxious How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks
An excellent book with a preconceived outlook. America the Anxious by Ruth Whippman is a well-written and witty book.Whippman is an excellent writer: her observations are sharp, her lines laugh-out-loud funny, and her research extensive. She dissects the American quest for happiness and concludes that all this search for happiness is causing a lot of anxiety among the seekers. She paints a picture of shallowness (and greed?) that pervades positive psychology and the teachings of self-help gurus. Happiness vending is a multi-billion dollar business and positive psychologists are right there with their dodgy research to cash in on the boom with TED Talks and book contracts. Other positive psychologists, to protect their lucrative territory, act as cheerleaders for poorly conceived studies with limited scientific validity.Whippmanâs description of the Landmark Education materials is hilarious: âIt gets to the point that whenever I start reading one of the sentences in their course material, I feel like I need to pack a lunch and a water bottle to make it to the end.â Ironically, though, her sentence that precedes this comment runs over five lines with 53 words! She walks us through Americaâs search for happiness through workaholism, religion, parenting, and social media. It is an amusing, and occasionally depressing, journey.Excellent so far. If the book just dealt with the exploration of how the quest for happiness is leading Americans to anxiety, I would have given it a five-star rating. But it doesnât. It takes a less critically examined alternative point of view to happiness and, in doing so, it distorts the authorâs less favored ideas. Neither does the book distinguish between the validity of an idea and the way it is practiced and promoted.For example, many self-help gurus teach that you donât have to depend on someone else to give you happiness. You can be free with who you are and what you have. This is what the Stoics and Buddhists also taught. So did the Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl. You may agree with this or not; it is up to you. But Whippman casually extrapolates it to imply that people who think this way do so to avoid improving the human condition and blame unhappy people for their misery. No Stoic or Buddhist I know (or even Tony Robbins or Dr. Phil or Viktor Frankl) would say or mean this. It is more likely that they would act to improve the human condition than worry exclusively about their happiness.When considering the effectiveness of meditation, she gives a low weight to the hundreds of studies that show a positive effect because many studies may be suspect. This is perfectly valid. But then she concludes meditation has no real effect because a single meta-analysis said so as if meta-analysis is a faultless and conclusive method. Similarly, when considering mindfulness, she seems to believe that people who practice it are inward looking and constantly âpolicing their thoughtsâ and ignores the more widely understood interpretation that mindfulness is about being aware of what is going on now rather than being constantly disturbed by thoughts of the future or the past.Her observations on these things may hold for people who live in the area where she lives; I donât know. It certainly does not describe anyone I know who seriously practices meditation or mindfulness. The purpose of mindfulness is to expand your awareness to what is happening right now, like the person who is talking to you right now, like the person who needs your help now.That brings me to the second point. Is Whippman talking about meditation and mindfulness as concepts or is she talking about the way they are packaged and practiced? While she doesnât clarify, I suspect it is the latter, combined with her ideological bias that these concepts are somehow âblaming the victimsâ and âkeeping people in their places.â It is one thing to disagree with the effectiveness of meditation or mindfulness. It is quite another to extrapolate it to mean avoiding social contacts and unwillingness to work toward social changes. While the happiness industry gets a thorough critical examination, her favored ideas are based on studies that receive almost no such examination.Although I have used meditation and mindfulness as examples, there are other things like this in the book that provide a less critically examined ideological backdrop. When she wants to establish that we are working longer hours, she does so by reinterpreting the statistics that indicate otherwise. As a matter of fact, she doesnât review many studies at all. Maybe her observations on many things hold for people who live in the area where she lives, but I am not sure if they apply to the entire US.So, for what I see as a flawed understanding of some basic concepts by viewing them through an ideological lens, I would give this book a single star.Averaging my five (for the bookâs insights) and one (for the…
Great read, important take on happiness