Trivial pursuits

Lucy Mangan, guest columnist (in likely the i, now known as The i Paper, on Saturday 30 March 2019) wrote a good piece of comment about happiness – titled, The pursuit of happiness is making us miserable – which I quote in full below, as clearly it left a mark as I had taken a photo of it (but didn’t include think to include the publication and date parts at the edges of the paper!).

It’s a piece that still seems relevant today.

I think it was the press release for the launch of a packet of anti-anxiety stickers designed to ‘re-balance the energy frequency in our bodies’ that finally snapped things into focus for me. ‘Too far’, I muttered to my reflection in the mirror before which I was standing, as I do every morning in order to try and corral the day’s worries scurrying round my mind so that I can clear the mental space needed to attend to the day’s work before me. ‘Too far.’

Not long after that, figures were released that showed the sales of self-help books to be soaring. And I understand it. I do. We are living in the age of anxiety and, in many ways, justifiably so. As the old saw has it – if you’re not worried, you haven’t understood the problem. Or problems: Trump; Brexit; Trump and Brexit as symptoms of a deeper, even more intractable malaise arising from growing inequality, fractured social contracts between governments and citizens, and technology-induced alienation from and constant rage with each other; the actual roasting of the actual earth, and so on.

It is natural that we seek ways to stop ourselves sinking into despair and ways to handle our worries. But that instinct has been fed, nurtured and mutated in important, unhealthy ways by the lucrative economy that has grown up around it.

Self-help books are a perfect expression of the problem. The worst of them, which in this case happens to mean almost all of them, do not teach their readers to cope with the vicissitudes of life. They teach – implicitly if not explicitly – that we all have a right to happiness. They insinuate that life should be a smooth, unbroken path of shining contentment from cradle to grave, walked under rainbows and lined with thornless roses. And by doing so, of course, they create the perfect conditions for the perpetuation of unhappiness, because life has never, will never, can never be like this and when their paths inevitably deviate from the promised ideal, people feel a creeping sense of failure or rage (delete according to temperament) instead of responding in time-honoured and healthier fashion. Which is to say ‘’kin’ ’ell’, shrug and trudge on.

It has become normal to expect happiness and to panic when it does not materialise. A friend who works as a school counsellor says she is spending more and more of her time reassuring the young people she sees that their fears and frettings are an absolutely standard, unavoidable fact of life, not symptoms of an embryonic disorder or mental illness. It is failing to reach the invented standard currently being held up to them by society as achievable that is causing them the most worry.

An unachievable standard helps other parts of society, however. If self-help books were to teach genuine coping strategies they would, like diet books that worked, put themselves out of business. And the same goes for the rest of the ever-expanding anxiety economy. It’s in nobody’s interests – not the manufacturers of soothing pillow sprays, meditation headbands just like the Buddha used to wear), colouring books, salt lamps, weighted blankets (full disclosure – I bought one, I love it, and a stopped clock is right twice a day, ’kay?) and of course energy-rebalancing stickers – to make something that actually solves the issue. Even my weighted blanket is just a snuggly sop. I still lie awake and fret. Mostly about whether my lungs are going to be able to inflate properly all night.

The wellness industry which, not coincidentally, rose in parallel with the anxiety economy, has already succeeded in dividing the world of food into ‘clean’ comestibles (rare, organic, gluten/lactose/meat-free, needing much effort to locate and strip/juice/bruise gently/spiralise or otherwise prepare, and therefore requiring much in the way of social and financial capital) and, by implication, ‘dirty’ (all the rest, including everything eaten without issue by most of the population throughout most of history) and separating us from our cash and our ease in the process.

But our mental health is more precious and more fragile, more easily affected by the things we put in and take out of it. The anxiety economy preys on us. It pathologises normal dips in mood, tells us that normal responses to bad things are wrong, persuades us that uncertainty is intolerable and promises us new products that will restore our equilibrium. In promising balance for our inner worlds, they are in essence denying the human condition and setting people – especially the young – up for failure.

They, you, we must resist, resist. We’ll be happier in the long run.

Lucy Mangan