Is your happiness a choice, as so many positive psychologists, coaches, classes, books, memes, and coffee mugs say? Are your feelings of joy, contentment, and purpose really under your control? Is well-being something you can improve with a few “simple steps,” as so many websites promise—including, sometimes, this one?
I’m American, and many Americans like to believe that success of any kind is largely a matter of will, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary. In fact, according to quite a few recent studies, there are events and forces at work today that are simply making happiness much less likely for many people, and which seem to be widening “happiness gaps” between the most privileged and everyone else: the mass-death event of COVID-19 and the chaos it has caused, racism, political conflict, and economic inequality, among other problems.
And yet, people who study happiness and promote ways to get more of it keep emphasizing the same cluster of individual-level tips and tools—mindfulness, gratitude journaling, etc.—and continue to suggest that you can control much of your subjective well-being with intentional strategies. As psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky once argued, 40% of the differences in well-being among people can be accounted for by the things individuals do, with half of the differences controlled by genetics and only 10% by circumstances.
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If you move outside of happiness studies, however, to other branches of psychology as well as fields like economics and sociology, a very different picture emerges: Happiness starts to look less like an individual choice and more like a product of institutional, economic, and historical forces, shaped by power differences between groups. Though I’ve always been aware of this blind spot in happiness research, my experience during the pandemic has led me to try harder to see what’s behind that curtain—and to explore the studies that do try to understand the impact of structural forces on happiness.