The happiness conspiracy: How the need to feel good is making us miserable

At the risk of coming across as something of a grouch, Andy Martin has a problem with happiness. As a new book points out, it’s an essentially selfish state of being, and society should stop chasing this illusion because it’ll only make us miserable. Even if you do own an orgasmatron...

Surfing is similar to happiness: it’s all about feeling good within yourself. It’s an internal, physiological and emotional state. Which means it is devoid of any morality (Shutterstock)

Thomas Jefferson made it a constitutional right in the US. “The pursuit of happiness.” You have the right to pursue wellbeing. No one is stopping you. Go ahead and pursue it. But when did a right morph into an obligation, a duty?

The founding fathers were influenced by the great voyages of discovery. Thanks to Captain Cook and his French counterpart Bougainville, the idea got about that everyone in the southern hemisphere was happier than in the cold and dismal north. We had the technology, we had the “civilisation”, but why didn’t we feel good about it? They had something we were lacking. Surfing was a case in point. According to European observers, the men and women riding waves had found a way to “allay all perturbation of mind”. The American constitution was, in effect, suggesting we ought to try living our lives on the crest of a wave.

The utopian project took off in the 19th century. America became the mecca of the heaven-on-earth brigade. We had the feeling that there were a lucky few that were having a high old time – why not the rest of us? Sigmund Freud was the first to say flat out, in his contrary way, that you’re wasting your time pursuing happiness. In Civilisation and its Discontents he argued that the “pleasure principle” was always going to run up against the “reality principle”. Reality doesn’t want you to be happy. Pain and punishment will always tend to outweigh pleasure. “The program [of the pleasure principle] is at loggerheads with the whole world … and cannot be fulfilled”. He denounced what he called “the oceanic feeling”, the transient impression of being connected to others and the wider world, as a delusion. He blamed Captain Cook, religion, and (honestly enough) psychoanalysis itself for making people think they could ever transcend the normal state of being miserable.