America the Anxious Read online

  Like an attractive man, it seems the more actively happiness is pursued, the more it refuses to call and starts avoiding you at parties.

  Americans as a whole invest more time and money and emotional energy in the explicit pursuit of happiness than any other nation on earth, but is all this effort and investment paying off? Is America getting happier and happier? Are Americans more content than people in other countries? Is this Great American Search for Happiness actually working?

  The answer appears to be a pretty clear no. Somehow, this great nation that included the pursuit of happiness so prominently in its founding principles has been shown by various international comparison studies to be one of the less happy places in the developed world. Although these studies are not without their problems, with different methodologies producing different results, Gallup’s 2014 Positive Experience Index, an international comparison study of the moment-to-moment happiness of people living in different nations, ranked America at an underwhelming twenty-fifth in the world, two places behind Rwanda.6

  For all the effort that Americans are putting into hunting down happiness, they are not actually getting any happier. According to the General Social Survey, a large-scale project that has been tracking trends in American life since the early seventies, there has been almost no change in American happiness levels since 1972, when records began. Every year, with remarkable consistency, around 30 percent of Americans report that they are “very happy.” It’s a fair chunk, but a figure that remains surprisingly constant, untouched by mindfulness or megachurches, by yoga or meditation or Gretchen Rubin or attachment parenting.

  According to the World Health Organization, as well as being one of the least-happy developed countries in the world, the United States is, by a wide margin, also the most anxious, with nearly a third of Americans likely to suffer from an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.7 A 2012 report by the American Psychological Association warned that the nation was on the verge of a “stress-induced public health crisis.”8

  There are many reasons why life in America is likely to produce anxiety compared to other developed nations: long working hours without paid vacation time for many, insecure employment conditions with little legal protection for workers, inequality, and the lack of universal health care coverage, to name a few. The happiness-seeking culture is clearly supposed to be part of the solution, but perhaps it is actually part of the problem. Perhaps America’s precocious levels of anxiety are happening not just in spite of the great national happiness rat race but also in part because of it.

  My journalistic curiosity kicks in, and I become full of questions. What is causing this strange paradox? Has something gone wrong with the way in which Americans are pursuing happiness? Or is the hunt for happiness counterproductive and damaging in and of itself? Am I just a meanspirited enemy of joy, or is a bit of British-style skepticism not such a bad thing? What really makes people happy in life? And most important, is there a more effective, less self-involved, and less stressful way to find happiness? If so, what is it?

  To get some answers, I decide to investigate the Great American Search for Happiness rat race in all its many forms. I’ve been a journalist for most of my career both in television and print, so I have the background to investigate, but my interest is just as much personal. I will look more closely at my own life and the lives of the people I know. I will sample some of the bliss-promising offerings and find out what the research really says about this great national obsession. What is it that really makes us happy? What doesn’t? All being well, we will be living in the United States for a good few years. During this time, I will make it my mission to work out just what is going on here.

  Is it possible to hunt down a happy life, or is the Great American Search for Happiness creating a nation of nervous wrecks?

  2.

  PERSONAL JOURNEY? IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU

  There should be a government information campaign, like the anti-drunk driving ones: Don’t Drink and Update. It’s 10 p.m., the bottle of wine next to me has a well-used look about it, and I’m recklessly updating my Facebook status. It’s back in the odd brief era when we were all using that stilted, slightly self-important third-person format on Facebook. “Britney Jones loves her kids.” “Bryan Smith is eating a sandwich,” as though we were drafting our own Wikipedia entries or live-blogging our obituaries. You could always tell the grammar pedants because they kept the third person thing going for the second sentence: “And she loves her hot man too…”; “but he’s removed the ham from it.…”

  This time, though, the format is perfect for what I’m about to write, helping me pretend that I’m not actually referring to myself at all, and that rather than being about to make a full frontal public declaration of loserdom, I’m merely raising awareness of a good cause, even engaging in an act of philanthropy. “Ruth Whippman…” goads Facebook’s prompt. I type: “has no friends. Can anyone help her find some?”

  Our first few months in the States have been tough. Inasmuch as I had given it any real thought, my vision of how life in California would be was sketchily drawn from a mixture of Hollywood, Baywatch, and paradise. Overfocusing on beaches and weather, I hadn’t really considered what it would feel like to be living without any of the usual scaffolding of my life at home—my job, my family and friends.

  For all this talk of American happiness, the truth is I’m not very happy myself, which is compounded by feeling guilty about this unwarranted lack of bliss. The upside of first world problems is obviously that they are first world problems, rather than, say, Ebola or starvation. The downside is that they condemn you to a life lived to the strains of a looping mental sound track of your own subconscious jeering “first world problems!” on endless repeat and thereby invalidating your every emotion. But despite being in the world headquarters of self-actualization, my general state is a kind of sluggish loneliness, a lack of belonging that eats away at my days.

  This isn’t helped by the fact that if the many happiness articles and advice blogs I’m reading are to be believed, I’m missing out on a supersize, star-spangled brand of happiness available only in America, like some kind of four-animal McDonald’s menu item, sold only in select outlets in Texas. The overriding message is that I should be dragging myself out of this slump and seizing it with both hands. The whole thing is making me feel like a bit of a failure.

  It’s hard not to get sucked in. I’ve caught myself scanning the Huffington Post’s “GPS for the Soul” pages before reading the news section in the morning. My Google searches have slowly shifted from my usual “Am I dying?/Is this cancer?/Is my child meeting milestones that I only knew existed through previous unhealthy googling?” toward “how to be happy.” Google (and presumably the NSA) quickly pegs me as a happiness seeker, popping up spooky personalized ads whenever I log on, urging me to sign up for “daily inspirational content delivered direct to your inbox.”

  The “inspirational content” tends to offer up a vision of the happy-ever-after somewhere between ashram and Barbie Dreamhouse. “How to Get Everything You Want!” promises the subject heading of one e-mail. I assume this is going to be the kind of wisdom gimmick that will tell me how to get Everything I Want simply by realizing that what I want is, by magical coincidence, exactly what I already have! or by adjusting what I want away from “a lottery win and a night with Ryan Gosling” toward “truly knowing the love of Jesus.” But, no, a click reveals it to be a straightforward, moral twist-free guide to getting Everything I Want, whether a pony, a castle, a signed photo of the Dalai Lama, or a one-way ticket to Everlasting Joy.

  Secretly though, I prefer this high-end happiness fantasy to the uncharacteristically depressing pair of advice e-mails that land in my inbox a few days later that make me paranoid that Google’s marketing algorithm has decided I’m beyond hope. They read:

  1) Happiness Is: Lowering Your Expectations.

  2) Time to Get a Cat.

  But none of the advice is really taking th
e edge off the basic feeling that I don’t quite belong here. In elementary school—while never quite the least popular person in the class, with my National Health Service glasses and Saturday mornings spent at Junior Orchestra—I was certainly in the remainder bin, usually around two weird kids away from total social isolation. This experience brings it back.

  * * *

  SO I’M THRILLED when my Facebook plea pays off. A couple of days after my post, a friend from London e-mails me to say that her old college roommate is living nearby, and that she is also the mom of a toddler boy. She introduces us over e-mail and sets us up on a “friend blind date.” After a few messages back and forth, Allison and I arrange to meet one morning with the kids in our local park.

  I like Allison immediately. Fizzing with energy, she is smart and funny, in that warm American way of engaging first and judging later, rather than the British way that generally means only getting on board when all options for cynicism are fully exhausted, and then only with a kind of grudging, embarrassed irony. She instantly dispenses with small talk, and we get stuck straight into a long rangy conversation that covers everything from potty training to the meaning of life.

  Having given up the promise of a high-powered career to raise son Ryan, and feeling underwhelmed with the day-to-day reality of toddler herding, Allison is on a mission to find happiness. She isn’t unhappy as such, but being a lifelong overachiever, thinks she can do better.

  She does yoga and meditation. She sees a therapist weekly. (She tells me that she once couldn’t talk to her sister for two weeks because both of their therapists were on vacation and the relationship couldn’t withstand unmediated socializing.) She practices mindfulness and reads Gretchen Rubin and is a devotee of a German self-help guru named Eckhart Tolle. I am embarrassed to have had never heard of Eckhart Tolle and surreptitiously google him on my phone while Allison is in the bathroom. A quick search turns up a beige-clad, gnomelike mystic offering brain-scrambling insights such as: “The secret of life is to ‘die before you die’—and find that there is no death.” It all feels a bit like being trapped in an elevator with a mystical self-help version of the Microsoft Word paper clip. “It looks like you’re writing a letter. Can I help?” or in Tolle’s case: “It looks like you’re struggling to transcend your ego-based state of consciousness. Can I offer you some verbose pseudo-Buddhism?”

  Although we are poles apart on many subjects, I really like Allison. She’s good fun and I admire her intelligence and good-natured willingness to tolerate my cynicism. I enjoy talking to her and she tells me she feels the same way. We agree we must meet up more often.

  It is later that I realize that Allison is very, very hard to get hold of. She is almost always busy. We text back and forth a few times trying to arrange another meeting, but it never quite pans out. During her relatively rare free time, she is almost always at yoga or meditating or on a retreat or at a workshop or blogging about her experiences. It makes me feel exhausted just hearing about it all. As she tells me regretfully, “I hardly have time to see anyone at the moment.” Apparently Allison is so busy trying to be happy, friendship has gone to the bottom of the list.

  * * *

  IT MAY WELL have just been an elaborate ruse to avoid me, and frankly who could blame her in my current state of toxic neediness, but Allison’s approach to finding happiness feels a bit back to front. After all, isn’t spending time with friends and other people exactly what makes life happy?

  But the more mainstream self-help type advice I read, the more I start to notice just how much of it pitches finding happiness as a personal journey that is best pursued alone.

  “Happiness comes from within” declare a thousand blogs and articles, positive psychology books, and Facebook memes. Variations include: “Happiness comes from within, not from others”; “Happiness is determined not by what’s happening around you but what’s happening inside you”; “Happiness should not depend on other people”; and the perky and social media friendly “Happiness is an inside job.” One e-mail I receive, advertising a new local yoga studio, even doubles down on the idea with the turbocharged word mash-up “withinwards.” (Although when I first see the subject heading “Go Withinwards,” I briefly think it’s a review for a new nose-to-tail offal restaurant.)

  I see what they’re all getting at, I think. But after a while, the whole philosophy starts to sound like a strange kind of emotional isolationism.

  “When you stray from the idea that happiness is inside of you, you start turning to people and things to make you happy,” writes one prominent psychologist on Oprah.com, a site that devotes large chunks of space to the pursuit of happiness and the idea that we must dig deep into our own souls to find it. His tone is disparaging enough to suggest that he could just as well substitute the words people and things with child pornography and human trafficking. “Following your joy should be an internal activity,” he concludes firmly, although providing no real explanation as to why.

  This conviction that happiness cannot be found via other people or the outside world has trickled down to become so basic and uncontroversial that it even forms the basis for an article on the For Dummies Web site, the series which has made its name taking complex subjects and stripping them down to their universally accepted bare essentials. Entitled “Considering the Four Happiness Myths,” the piece says definitively: “Just as money can’t make you happy, other people can’t make you happy either.”

  Given my own current social isolation, the revelation that other people can’t make me happy, and that I should be pursuing happiness within and alone, feels odd. As an experiment, I try a Google image search for “Inspirational meme: Happiness is other people.”

  This is what shows up:

  Hell is other people.

  If happiness depends on other people, you’re gonna have a bad time.

  Fuck you and your happiness.

  And, most perplexingly, a picture of Hitler and another unidentified Nazi guffawing at a shared private joke with the caption: “Life is about doing the things that make you happy, not the things that please other people.” I’m not entirely sure what the inspirational take-home from this is supposed to be. Genocide?

  * * *

  WHETHER CONSCIOUSLY OR not, people are clearly buying into the idea that happiness should not be sought through other people.

  Increasingly, Americans are chasing happiness by looking inward into their own souls, rather than outward toward their friends and communities. Nearly half of all meals in America are now eaten alone.1 The average American has fewer close friends than he or she did twenty years ago.2 According to the General Social Survey, in 1974, nearly half of the American population had socialized with their neighbors in the last month. By 2008 it was less than one third and that figure has declined every year since.3

  In another factoid that I secretly find oddly validating, helping keep a lid on my nagging, high school–inspired paranoia that everyone else is always at a Fantastic Party that I haven’t been invited to, the American Time Use Survey shows that the average American now spends less than four minutes a day “hosting or attending social events,” a category that covers all types of organized hosted social occasions apart from the most spur-of-the-moment informal.4 Four minutes? Added up over a year that barely covers Christmas, Thanksgiving, and your own kids’ birthday parties.

  Perhaps even more surprisingly, the same surveys show that people in this country spend just thirty-six minutes a day doing any kind of “socializing and communicating” at all, where this is their main activity and not an incidental part of something else like working. This is in comparison to three hours watching television and even, for women, an hour “grooming.”

  The figure sounds so low that I call the Time Use Survey’s help line just to check what it includes (feeling mildly relieved as I do so that no one is surveying my own Time Use). As it turns out, not only is the thirty-six-minute figure correct, it also doesn’t just cover the good kind of socializing
and communicating, but any form of communication at all when more than one adult is present, including arguing, nagging, bitching, and trying to convince your husband that For the Love of God, Being Born with a Y Chromosome Should Not Mean a Biological Inability to Search Inside a Fridge.

  But at the same time that American socializing has taken a nosedive, there has been an explosion in the uptake of solitary “happiness pursuits,” activities that are carried out either completely alone or in a group without interaction, with the explicit aim that each person stays locked in their own private emotional experience.

  Meditation has seen a dramatic breakthrough in the last few years, with more than twenty million people across the country now regularly meditating.5 Time magazine reports that Americans spend around four billion dollars a year on “mindfulness products.”6 Yoga has seen a similarly spectacular ascension, with the country now spending ten billion dollars a year on yoga classes and accessories,7 making yoga the fourth fastest growing industry in America.8 These figures are significant enough that savvy marketeers have even designated a whole new category they are calling “spiritual spending.”

  The self-help industry—with its guiding principle that the search for happiness should be an individual, self-focused enterprise—is also booming, with Americans now buying a billion dollars worth of self-help books and audiobooks a year9 to help guide them on their inner journeys.*

  And in what sounds like a extended metaphor from a midlist 1970s sci-fi novel, in which all human emotions are contracted out to soul-sucking personal microcomputers, there are now close to a thousand different options for smartphone apps to help us locate happiness deep within our cell phones.