PART 2 of Does life have meaning Series: How do we find meaning (and happiness) in the contemporary age?
In the so-called 'happiest' countries in the world, the uncomfortable reality of high rates of depression, suicidality, chronic pain, and social isolation are obscured by the conflation of happiness with capitalist conformity.
In this intriguing talk, Rob Boddice challenges the tenets of happiness indices that flatten the subjective states of citizens, asking pointedly if it is still possible for suffering to be a virtue.
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With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine, without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Be inspired to explore your inner creativity with Viola Davis' memoir Finding Me. Find what peaks your imagination with Audible. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. Hello, and welcome to Philosophy for Artimes, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. My name's Dan, and I'm joined again by Margarita. Hello, it's great to be back. So today, we're carrying on with our Summertime Search for Meaning series. Last week, we heard from award-winning psychologist John Verveke, who shared his ideas on the meaning crisis and what gives life meaning. Whilst today, we're hearing from historian Rob Bottas, who questions the way our society values and especially measures, a happy life. He takes his own country, Finland, one of the happiest countries in the world, as a case study and asks, "Is happiness everything or is suffering part of life?" Good evening. Hi, I'm Rob Bottas. I'm a senior researcher at the Center for the History of Experiences at Tampa University in Finland. In March this year, Finland was ranked the happiest country in the world for the six year in a row by the World Happiness Report. Now, what this actually means is obscured in the way it's handled by politicians and by tourist agencies and the media. Visit Finland, Finland's official tourist board, pronounces proudly on its website, Happiness It's In Our Nature, before boasting that Finland is the happiest country in the world. Now, after the last report, it offered a prize of happiness master classes in the Finnish wilderness. Happiness, it would seem, sells. The World Happiness Report makes headlines around the world and many are eager to find out the secret to the happiness of the Finnish people. So what are we to do with the following data? Finland's suicide rate remains high, 13.4 per annum for 100,000 people averaged across genders. The number is over 20 for men. And this place is at 146 out of 183 countries. It has the highest incidence of mental disorders in the EU. In 2021, while apparently being the happiest place on Earth, Finland was ninth globally in depression cases per capita. So what is the World Happiness Report measuring if these kinds of things aren't being factored in? Well, first start, the World Happiness Report claims to measure subjective well-being, not happiness. And the translation from one to the other that becomes magnified by the media is unjustified. The report uses Gallup Poll data designed to evaluate satisfaction, where people rank their lives in multiple areas on a scale of 0 to 10. The responses are compiled into six comparative categories, encompassing GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. Now one might imagine that a respondent could score their lives highly across these categories and never actually address how they feel. The survey form, which is identical in every country in which it's deployed, takes no account of contextual conceptual differences about what well-being or happiness even means. In some so-called happiness in the World Happiness Report, doesn't meaningfully represent how people in any given country actually feel. But the way in which the report is deployed does obscure or erase suffering. So let's have a little background. The first World Happiness Report was published in 2012 in support of the UN high-level meeting on happiness and well-being. Since then, according to the rather gleeful 2017 report, we have come a long way. Happiness is increasingly considered the proper measure of social progress and the goal of public policy. Now by way of substantiating this extraordinary remark, the report begins by noting that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development to the OECD, which has 38 member states and commands a budget of over 300 million euros, has committed itself, quote, "to redefine the growth narrative to put people's well-being at the centre of government's efforts." Thus, happiness and well-being are intertwined, connected to progress, and made the subject of economic policy in particular. If the World Happiness Report leaves more questions than it answers, how about other surveys? The OECD Better Life Index, who gone in 2011, claims that measuring feelings can be very subjective, but it's nonetheless a useful complement to more objective data when comparing quality of life across countries. Subjective data can provide a personal evaluation of an individual's health, education, income, personal fulfilment, and social conditions. Surveys in particular are used to measure life satisfaction and happiness. The website here informs that life satisfaction is a measure of how people evaluate their life as a whole rather than their current feelings. But if you hover your cursor over the link to the life satisfaction data as I did, a little pop-up appears asking, "How happy are you?" showing a clear intent, but correlate happy feelings and overall satisfaction. The data here is compiled from people's answers to surveys and opinion polls, but it's not immediately apparent how inclusive this data is, though it gives the index a gloss of real-life plausibility. Denmark currently ranks third overall, this list, and the language of satisfaction is the key marker in this index, which is given a number rating out of 10. Now the Danes gave themselves 7.5 out of 10 for general satisfaction, showing that they are more satisfied with their lives than the OECD average. To satisfaction equate to happiness, what does it mean to be 7.5 out of 10 satisfied, and what extremes for such a number conceal? Denmark has a suicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people, placing its 78th out of 183, according to WHO data from 2021. Data from another study from 2015 shows that among the little over 2 million Danes and residents of Denmark, born between January 1971 and December 2002, and resident in Denmark on their 10th birthday, over 46,900 people had attempted suicide, while over 1,400 people had actually committed suicide, giving a suicidality rate of 2,337 per 100,000 people over part of the whole life course, not including those people who had suicidal thoughts. And we might well ask, if well-being, this largely but not entirely economic category, is being conflated with happiness, then why are so many Danes trying to kill themselves? The reality is that these kinds of happiness and well-being surveys, reports and indices don't tell us very much at all about what it's like experientially to live in these places. They do not say how it is to be marginalised in these places by race or gender, age, ability, sexual orientation. Notice it's say what the causes of a statistically manifest happiness might be. One might even argue that such things are part of the problem for encountering happiness in political and economic terms, and in promoting political and economic solutions to unhappiness, they implicitly operate according to a sort of neoliberal capitalist agenda. But it's the symptoms of precisely that agenda, unfulfilling work, thy debt, stress, lack of community, loneliness, etc., that make people unhappy. Eva eludes famously coined the phrase emotional capitalism to describe the appropriation of emotions by economic processes which in turn have come to define social relations. In emotional capitalism, she explains, "affet has made an essential aspect of economic behaviour and emotional life, especially that of the middle classes, follows the logic of economic relations and exchange, market-based cultural repertoire, shape and inform into personal and emotional relationships. Hence economic relationships become irrevocably bundled with prescriptions for emotional practices." In her terms, phrases like cooperation and teamwork have promoted the language of psychologists and the corporate language of efficiency to the extent that people now feel through these scripts conceptualising corporate relations as relations per se. I would add that when happiness and well-being conceived as a single category are defined in economic terms, work-life balance, health conceived of as a question of work efficiency, fulfilment at work, education to prime one only for work, then the reach of emotional capitalism becomes almost total. Following on from this, I'm concerned to lay out the political implications of this colonisation of happiness and well-being by policy makers. What difference does it make that governments might refer to such indices and reports to tell us that we are happy? What's happening to the experience of happiness when the terms of happiness are being explicitly prescribed so as to conform to politicised metrics? And I think this is a pressing concern for everyone. Can we or do we want to break free of the limiting terms of happiness under emotional capitalism? Or is it sufficient that we simply recognise how the terms of our happiness are being appropriated in order to disrupt and resist them? Now, few politicians were more explicit about the happiness agenda than David Cameron. Following the example of Bhutan, where a gross national happiness index was initiated in 2008, after, I should say, one sixth of the population had been expelled from that country for failing to fall into line with Buddhist culture, Cameron launched an initiative in Britain in 2010 to get beyond GDP as a measure of the nation's well-being. In a speech, he quoted Bobby Kennedy who once said that GDP does not allow for the health of our children the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. Cameron endorsed these sentiments while branding them an overstatement. Nonetheless, he asked the Office of National Statistics to devise a new way of measuring well-being in Britain. He pointed out his own examples of how GDP itself can tell a misleading story. GDP increases after an earthquake because of reconstruction. GDP increases when a city is torn apart by a crime and disorder because we spend money on locks. A person falling seriously ill can increase GDP because of the cost of buying drugs and paying for care. GDP goes up by this logic but well-being goes down. But the specific politics of his happiness agenda addressed social conservative concerns about progressive social policies that had negatively impacted well-being from a specifically conservative point of view. Cameron's examples were explicit. We had in Britain something of an immigration free-for-all justified by the argument that it's supposed to be good for growth but without enough thought about the impact on public services and social cohesion. His happiness agenda was anti-immigration based on an assessment that well-being was adversely affected by immigration. We've had something of a cheap booze free-for-all, again supposed to be good for growth but were we really thinking about the impact of that on law and order and on well-being. His happiness agenda was in some ways anti-social, pro-law and order and implicitly expressed a desire to appropriate people's personal health and the government policy. We've had something of an irresponsible media and marketing free-for-all. Again this was meant to be good for growth but what about the impact on childhood. Now the specifics of this statement are less clear though the connection of the happiness agenda to occur tailman of media freedoms is implicit. In some Cameron's happiness agenda looked a lot like conservative party policy. By 2014 in the depths of austerity politics and an apparent wave of misery across the country, this happiness agenda looked lost but Brian Wheeler for the BBC reported in that year that it was very much alive if an apparent disarray. His editorial on the happiness agenda and on the testimony of the man responsible then responsible for it Nick Hurd MP before a parliamentary committee is evidence of critical skepticism about its usefulness. Nick Hurd for a man in the happiness business does not smile very much. According to Hurd's testimony happiness is a very difficult concept to measure. You are constantly tiptoeing towards stating the bleeding obvious. The ineffectiveness of the happiness agenda and influencing policy is summarized in the following key points. Why are people in stock on trend less content with life than those in other towns? It's something to do with their personal characteristics apparently and what about Swansea? Why are its inhabitants so miserable? No one seems to know. The journalistic score on aside the substantial point is that the happiness agenda despite the efforts of those who try to measure wellbeing does not actually make much difference beyond rhetoric but this is not to belittle rhetoric. Rhetoric is the politician's main weapon. Rhetoric can make emotions if it's constructed well. When Cameron set out the happiness agenda it was a way of attaching an affective qualitative and life-affirming set of labels to an otherwise fairly typical conservative platform. It was branding attempting to make Tories feel good about being Tories maybe and maybe in that respect it worked. If so it did not so much as measure happiness as make it. For those who suffered from the rafts of cuts social and benefits bending the happiness agenda was nothing but empty rhetoric and a motive bite with no teeth and it certainly does look lost. Now elsewhere the happiness agenda has been institutionalised at the level of high politics in no uncertain terms. In February 2016 the United Arab Emirates appointed its first Minister of Happiness. The first office holder was a who had been to Palfan al-Lumi who also acted as the Director General of the Prime Minister's Office and as a member of the Global Entrepreneurship Council of the UN. This coupled with her background in business administration suggests the subtext of this particular happiness agenda. What is the purpose of government if it does not work toward the happiness of the people she has asked? It's the duty and role of the government to create the right conditions for people to choose to be happy, she says. Now if that construction seems to put quite some distance between her office and the actual creation of happiness, happiness perhaps this is apt. The focus as with the happiness indices is actually on well-being and that ultimately makes the office economically orientated. In the politics of happiness these policies have an irresistibly positive appeal. We have no intention as the government to impose happiness or mandate it or force it, she says. We're just doing the right thing for our people so they can have a better life. Quite how it might be imposed, mandated or forced if a government chose to do so is perhaps moot. Then again the emphasis on simply altering conditions so that people can choose happiness, understates the government, understates the government's intentions. For Rumi has also said that cultivating happiness is a science. It touches on medicine, health, social sciences. She says we're trying to bring it from a broad framework into a daily practice in our society. So what are the specific measures in the UAE designed to make the conditions for happiness? As one of her advisors, Mike Viking of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen Denmark said in 2017, they don't know yet how they're going to increase happiness. First they're trying to work out what drives well-being in the country. Still, Rumi has installed happiness meters in offices, much like those you see outside bathrooms and airport security lines. The Minister of Happiness launched a campaign for 100 days of positivity and students and teachers are pledged to practice positive behaviour. There are happiness patrols in Abu Dhabi. Good drivers get rewards rather than bad drivers getting tickets. It's surveillance with a positive twist. It nevertheless depends for its success on drivers carrying an awareness that they're being watched. Rumi has sent her chief happiness and positivity officers off into the world to be trained in how to create a more positive workforce and ultimately a more joyful nation. Though it's unclear whether the greater good science centre at UC Berkeley or the mindfulness centre at the University of Oxford will be able to impart such specific policy advice. The former aims to study the psychology, sociology and neuroscience of well-being and teacher skills that foster a thriving resilient and compassionate society, whereas the latter has a vision of the world without the devastating effects of depression where mindfulness enables people to live with awareness, wisdom and compassion. Again with a focus on clinical and neuroscientific research so as to develop and teach new approaches to mindfulness-based interventions. When mindfulness becomes government policy and when business and economics are top of mind the word intervention has the potential to raise ethical concerns. Are the politics of happiness really about individual feelings of well-being or are they about instrumentalizing happiness to business efficiency? After all, depression costs money directly and indirectly. Absenteeism is a major drag on profitability. Illus notes that psychologists were invited into the corporate realm of management, precisely to find solutions to the problem of discipline and productivity. It's not so much that the workers' emotions have to go away, so much as that they have to be refocused and newly delimited so as to operate within the framework of the corporation's needs of its employees as workers and of workers as consumers. Being compelled to smile may be formational of happiness but the happiness we are talking about is defined and delimited by the context of the forced smile. It's not happiness in a kind of abstract sense. If emotional states are always subject to instrumentalization, direction, delimitation then corporate emotions. That's what we're talking about really. Corporate emotions are only a more conscious form of control. With these things in mind, how likely is it that happiness as government project conjures with happiness as an end in itself rather than a means to something else? Now, you might think my narrative sounds somewhat cynical, but I want to point out that the UAE's record on making people unhappy has been particularly noted by such groups as Amnesty International, who are on record as recently as 2022, pointing out the UAE's involvement in torture, extrajudicial detention and widespread discrimination. The United States noted in a State Department report on human rights practices for 2016 that the UAE's chief problems were "the inability of citizens to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections, limitations on civil liberties, including freedoms of speech, press, assembly and association, and arrests without charge in communicado detentions, lengthy pretrial detentions and mistreatment during detention." These are compounded by lack of government transparency, police and prison guard brutality, government interference with privacy rights, including arrests and detentions for internet postings or commentary, and a lack of judicial independence. The list goes on, noting that citizens, women, and people with HIV/AIDS come in for particularly rough treatment in society. It's highly unlikely that the jurisdiction of the Minister for Happiness is far reaching enough to allow UAE citizens to choose happiness under these kinds of conditions. Now, parallel to all this happiness, politicking and happiness indices, there are parallel studies on suffering in society that to me at any rate seem far more indicative of subjective well-being or its lack. Judy Foreman compiled the statistics for chronic pain sufferers for the United States and found that 100 million American adults live in chronic pain. That figure comes from a report by the Institute of Medicine and it's corroborated by other studies and similar numbers are found in other nations, ranging from 35% in chronic pain in the UK to anything between 18 and 50% in chronic pain in Australia. The numbers are from a certain perspective astounding for they indicate a problem of such scale that no system seems able even to conceive of helping it. In so far as this great wave of continual suffering is turned into a political problem, a policy problem, an institutional problem, or as a drain on profitability or productivity, workplace satisfaction, or perhaps most cynically as a problem that hinders compliance or happiness, according to that political construct, then chronic pain, the experience of it, is displaced into logics and rhetoric that only address the suffering indirectly. The problems often measured in terms only of cost, time off work, cost per person per year for the healthcare system, unemployment, payment of benefits and so on. So the point that it seems that the motivation for solving or solving chronic pain is to keep people in labour and to reduce costs. Chronic pain is a social burden to be eliminated not primarily out of compassion for suffering, but for economic and social efficiency and political expediency. Patients are expensive. As one 2014 study found tracking outpatient visits over eight years, the cost for pain medication annually in the United States was $17.8 billion. A program for the reduction of suffering is a means to economic ends. This framing of chronic pain is formation of the experience of chronic pain. For sufferers, broad express is usually fruitlessly the structural frustration that compounds individual difficulties. After all, the scholarly presentation of the economic costs of chronic pain have been presented in similar ways for decades. In the late 1970s, Stephen Brainer referred to the staggering costs of chronic pain. In 1981, the National Institute of Drug Abuse in the U.S. published a book that tallied 700 million lost work days a year with costs for healthcare and payments for compensation, litigation and quackery at almost $60 billion annually. While one could point to structural and treatment improvements in various directions since then the problem is larger than it was, chronic pain is now bound up in the politics of well-being and happiness and pounded with structural problems of community breakdown, an epidemic of loneliness and lack of social support. The apparent availability of access to healthcare and essentially meaningless statistics suggesting that national happiness can be measured are offered as a rhetorical fillet to the reality of austerity politics with growing poverty rates, social isolation, rising suicidality and systemic frustration of the expression of pain. According to one recent study, more than 20% of Europeans were wished themselves dead during their lives are difficult to isolate who those people are, but it's certain that chronic pain and associated conditions like generalized anxiety disorder increase the likelihood of suicide ideation and suicide attempts. The true cost of chronic pain is encapsulated by the silent and silent suffering of so many millions suffering alone. The common refrain is that chronic pain serves no adaptive purpose, it's useless. Such an appraisal overlooks the centuries of suffering in which pains long endured were fitted into cosmologies but not only made sense of them but put a positive value on them. How much more endurable were chronic pains when one understood them to be necessary experiences on the road to salvation in the hereafter? But this useless appraisal filters down into lay understandings of chronic pain such that millions who endure it do so in the knowledge that it's a biological anomaly. In worlds drained of moral and religious frameworks of explanation about the value of pain suffering without recourse to relief seems meaningless and unrelenting only a burden on society. The most resignation becomes part and parcel of what they know for others resistance to submission refusal to be patient, refusal to conform to the demands of happiness politics defines what pain drives them to do and thus we've seen in recent years major campaigns for the recognition of sufferers of endometriosis, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, long covid and so on which are defined by their demand to have the lived experiences of pain that typifies each of these categories acknowledged as real and their concomitant demand for medical and social validation of these conditions is true diagnosis for those in pain especially those in pain that endures or never seems to end. Modernity's stress on the pursuit of a narrowly defined happiness stress on the individual on self-reliance or individual responsibility on subjectivity over notions of society collective experience or community comes at a great cost. It's not only that these structural qualities of modernity underwrite the modern disease of loneliness it's that they also seem to thought into subjective and relational solutions to suffering as pain takes hold and forces withdrawal an apparent lack of sociality logically super adds isolation to the pain syndrome worsening its its experience the sufferer becomes invisible and this ultimately is a process accelerated by celebrations of national happiness and that's the end of my talk thanks very much for listening. Thanks for listening to philosophy for our times. This week we'll release our first bonus episode of releasing content not available on any other platform as part of our summer time search for meaning series and for this we will bring back John Vivekki.
