http://joys.net/38986/america-the-anxious-how-our-pursuit-of-happiness-is-creating-a-nation-of-nervous-wrecks/ Bringing Joys and Happiness Fri, 13 Mar 2020 09:48:42 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2 http://joys.net/38986/america-the-anxious-how-our-pursuit-of-happiness-is-creating-a-nation-of-nervous-wrecks/#comment-35226 True Joy Wed, 01 Nov 2017 09:33:11 +0000 http://joys.net/38986/america-the-anxious-how-our-pursuit-of-happiness-is-creating-a-nation-of-nervous-wrecks/#comment-35226 Great read, important take on happiness

]]> http://joys.net/38986/america-the-anxious-how-our-pursuit-of-happiness-is-creating-a-nation-of-nervous-wrecks/#comment-35225 Dr. Chuck Chakrapani Wed, 01 Nov 2017 09:20:27 +0000 http://joys.net/38986/america-the-anxious-how-our-pursuit-of-happiness-is-creating-a-nation-of-nervous-wrecks/#comment-35225 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.Whippman’s description of the Landmark Education materials is hilarious: “It 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.” Ironically, though, her sentence that precedes this comment runs over five lines with 53 words! She walks us through America’s 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 doesn’t. It takes a less critically examined alternative point of view to happiness and, in doing so, it distorts the author’s 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 don’t 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 “policing their thoughts” 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 don’t 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 doesn’t clarify, I suspect it is the latter, combined with her ideological bias that these concepts are somehow “blaming the victims” and “keeping people in their places.” 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 doesn’t 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 book’s insights) and one (for the…

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