Wellness as Tyranny: The Cult of Toxic Happiness
Be happy. Think of your wellness. Across organisations, private and public entities, government bodies and social clubs, the cult of contrived happiness abounds with ritualistic, clotting repetition. In such cases, the forced grin, the pressured smile, the affected giggle, have become part of a project of puppeteering, manipulation and manufacture. Critics of such approaches are ostracised, treated as leprous reminders of reality.
The cult of orchestrated happiness is intended to veil, covering the moonscape scars and lingering mutilations of life. The forced smile, as it has so often been, repels reality. It is also intended as a transferral of responsibility for problems one complains about to the complainant. To be happy by design is to excuse defect and injustice, casually skipping over larger imperfections. “Toxic positivity,” writes Mita Mallick, “is the idea that no matter how bad or stressful a situation, no matter how difficult the circumstances are, you can change your outcome simply by being positive and thinking positively.”
Mallick goes on to suggest that when toxic positivity, as a practice, makes its unwelcome appearance, “we put the responsibility on individuals to endure and persevere in toxic, dysfunctional and broken structures and systems.” Negative views are shunned, seen as unhelpful and disruptive. Their holders, in turn, are encouraged to feel shame, guilt and cherish immaturity.
The nature of such forced happiness has become industrialised and marketed. Rina Raphael, who has studied the wellness industry, notes its effects on certain groups as well. Women, she argues, are being sedated “with consumerist self-care”. Stress can be banished as an act of faith and salvation, dispelled through yoga classes or taking soothing bubble baths. The actual culprit – the issue of overwork, for instance – can be ignored. Even more critically, forget the collective dimension at play, which the wellness market reduces to a matter of individual action and choice.
Tim Lott also reminds us that this has roots in a specific understanding of economic organisation. He takes the prod to capitalism, where happiness is aim and object, involving shopping, playing, exercising, granting funds to charity and such. Companies ensure that workplaces include gimmicks, distractions, and treats in the name of building the resilience of their worker bees: the workplace, for instance, modelled on a nightclub, with open bars and zones of mandatory tranquillity. The workplace, monitored by such creepily absurd commissars as the “funsultants”, have become a domain for the wellness police, agents of what the late Barbara Ehrenreich called the “epidemic of wellness”.
Ehrenreich, in her snappy book Natural Causes, offered a mischievous critique of such an epidemic in the context of postponing death. “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone it.” On the other hand, “you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.” Sober words of philosophical sting which, sadly, have done little to arrest the growth of the wellness industry.
Toxic happiness, the cult of happiness, has become an imperative of iron clad worth. Carl Cederström and André Spicer note in The Wellness Syndrome that even the most mundane tasks of the day must be seen as acts of improvement and wellness. “When we engage in boring activities, such as washing up at home, we should think of them as improving our mindfulness. Even baking a loaf of bread is now recast as a way of nurturing our wellbeing.”
The cult of forced happiness acts as a conscious program to defang and dilute opposition, maligning critics who refuse to join the fascists of the grin, the authoritarians of the forcedsmiled. It stiffens the sinews of groupthink and discourages naysayers who wish to challenge organisational behaviour or correct errors. Whistleblowers worried about reporting corporate malfeasance or criminality in government organisations find themselves hounded and scolded for not being loyal in patriotic silence. They should have tasted wellness and its therapeutic properties. To be unhappy, it follows, is to be critical and dangerously free.
Wellness as a principle of organisational behaviour has also become a rigid legal component. Employers remind their employees that they must take time off, rush off on annual leave and ensure that the organisation does not labour under “liabilities” that will cut into budgets and raise questions about the quality of the workplace. Most cringingly of all, many employers insist that the public holiday becomes the perfect point at which to take that leave.
Unhappiness has become the hunted enemy, and stomped upon. The time has come for a constructive sense of informed unhappiness to take over, the sulky, the gravely sullen and the profoundly introspective to have their time in necessary bleakness. Wellness industry, begone!
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6 comments
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Carina McNaughton
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Phil Pryor
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Bert
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paul walter
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leefe
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Clakka
Return to home pageSociety makes those of us who are autistic, ADHD. Neurodiverse feel like we should fit the be happy wellness mould all of the time..No room for differences, no need to make any accomodations or modifications to the workplace.. Just smile and push on.
Snake oil, wellness, quack doctors, tonics, miracles, success, cures, acceptance, it’s all here so get spending at your humungous sized monument to being possibly crook, your huge discount store near you. Australia has very expensive droppings and pee, so salvation is assured…
Reality is a bitter pill sometimes, but it needs to be taken without the spoonful of sugar.
Reality allows us to look at the real issues we face, both individually and collectively and work on finding solutions.
Sadly the wellbeing gurus are in it to monitise unhappiness, put on the fake smile and watch the bank account grow for the guru, shrink for the patient.
Ties in with the post on sport.
Who controls the narrative and why?
Maybe it is of no import in the bigger sense, but when humans fqll for spin can commit events of the sort we have seen in Palestine, it does matter , both for us, as people who would see civilisation aided, and millions of deeply suffering human people who feel pain just like us.
It’s healthier to be honest withh yourself about how much things suck. Much less stress.
I guess that from some perspective, we are all as children really. Like for them it seems important that we retain the ability to cry, to wail, to squeal with joy, and laugh, and to generally just ramble on.
I recently responded to a post of the Guardian article of the ABC’s interview with muso Nick Cave, who lost two young sons:
“He certainly immersed himself – way to go! I couldn’t count the number of muso acquaintances dissed him – I always thought … ha yeah, jealousy. I always saw and revered his ‘darkness’ as an appropriate response to the mass bloating diet of sugar pop and ego-love-whining. Sorta like the beautiful darkness in the Irish muse – much to be said about loss and acceptance. The spot on the ABC’s Oz Story was an excellent portrayal.”
We are, and always have been, exposed to matters that will induce reactions of fear and anxiety, and our reactions of fight or flight or freeze. A primordial response for all beasts, from birth.
Of course, as soon as we developed language, depending on how we were raised up, we learned how to moderate the response by reaction or self-control.
Nevertheless, the peddlers of power spread stories and ‘news’ to niggle at fear and anxiety pertaining to other beasts, spirits, gods, and other groups of humans and an almost endless variety of circumstances. It became an embedded generational plague driven by stories of past present and future, and even by the effects of epigenetic and cultural migration. It became the human misery (as opposed to joie de vivre) that underlies all our thoughts, and today appears accelerated by the internet of everything.
The niggling at fear and anxiety is to a large degree the world’s politician’s favourite tool, and also that of the ‘elite’ and corporations. Yet most are unaware of the inherent physical and psychological mechanisms available to us to deal with and / or moderate our response, and lead a life unencumbered. Here’s a couple of quite different clues.
First of all, the mechanics of fear, anxiety and depression and its moderation How to overcome fear and anxiety that are holding you back. “Your biological responses to fear are at the core of depression, anxiety, failed relationships and much of human misery. But you can change how your body reacts to threats – some steps are as simple as adjusting your breathing.” It’s so worth listening to all the way through.
“Fear has evolved as a set of powerful physical reactions for surviving predators. In modern life we face very different threats, but the same ancient, automatic fear responses are triggered. And that doesn’t end well. It has a huge impact on our physical and mental health, our behaviour, our capacity to think clearly and our ability to relate to each other.” Reflections on Fear, Anxiety and Depression was provided by the <a href=“https://yorkfestivalofideas.com/“<York Festival of Ideas. The Festival is led by the University of York, UK. Speaker Michael Guilding Psychotherapist and trainer. Further information Michael Guilding’s articles on complex trauma.
Secondly, some interesting insights from BBC Arts Hour on various aspects of stage and screen, where participants and audiences are brought into plunging into the human psyche. Amongst others, in particular the insights of Indian comedian, Anirban Dasgupta. The entire programme is worth a listen Indian Comedian Anirban Dasgupta
That’s one of my rambles for the day.