The Happiness Industrial Complex is Broken
Original Medium Post HERE
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Community joy can fix it
I thought I had coined “happiness industrial complex.” I was proud.
But as I prepared to write this blog post, a quick Google search disabused me of the notion.
You might wonder: why would I be proud to coin a term that seems so critical of work to improve happiness? Afterall, I have a TEDx talk on joy.
The title of that talk: “Why Joy is Not a Solo Sport” explains my criticism. Despite spending billions of dollars each year to increase our individual happiness, happiness has been trending down among American adults since at least the 1990s, and among adolescents for nearly 15 years.
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The reason is simple. We can’t get there alone. In fact, spending too much time pursuing our own individual happiness might sometimes lead to reduced happiness.[1]
What so much individual happiness work misses is that the best way to increase your own happiness is to focus on increasing the happiness of others in your community. When your friend becomes happy, you become 63% likelier to be happy — if that friend lives within a mile. Even when a friend of a friend of that friend experiences increased happiness, you have an increased chance of becoming happier, if that group of friends all live within a mile!
This is really good news. You might have heard sadness is contagious — and it is. Many other negative emotions are contagious too. But positive emotions, like happiness, are much more contagious than even the negative feelings are.
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The positive psychology field has produced important research about how to increase individual wellbeing — and much of it is focused on what one individual can do outside oneself. Increasingly, researchers and practitioners are recognizing the need for a new focus. We need research and practice to determine how a group of individuals: a community can grow collective joy at a faster pace than broader environmental factors are dragging our collective happiness down. Let’s go to that joyful frontier together!
In this newsletter, we will examine what matters most for joy (emotional wellbeing x time), and how communities can advance it. There is a big place for you and your happiness in this too; we are going to examine how, by pursuing joy in community — and by supporting communities in pursuing joy, we can increase our individual happiness at the same time.
The happiness industrial complex is broken. With community joy, we can fix it, together.
Stay joyful, Eastie.
This is a version of a Medium post, slightly edited. The full series, and other posts are at: https://medium.com/@justinpasquariello (this post was published in January 2023, and published in Medium's Connections more recently (with gratitude to Susan Brearley)).
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[1] This isn’t at all to argue against self-care. Taking care of our own emotional, physical and mental wellbeing is essential for enabling us to be most present for, and helpful for, others. We just need to strike the right balance-and likely will be most successful in increasing our own happiness when our self-care is in the pursuit of enabling us to take better care of others.