So there’s always a strong connection between popular morality and how we think of happiness. But you can see happiness as reflecting the accepted values during a particular era, and those values evolve over time. My point is that it’s impossible to actually know what happiness is. I think there have been happiness fantasies during all periods. You call this our “happiness fantasy.” Why? Carl Cederström

The idea is that we’re happy if we reach our full potential as human beings and live authentically. The prevailing conception of happiness today is something like self-actualization, which is rooted in the “human potential movement” of the 1960s.

I spoke to Cederström about how this happened and why he thinks happiness ought to be seen as a collective project that promotes deeper engagement with the world around us.Ī lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. And that hyper-individualistic culture actually makes us much less happy than we could be. He argues that the values of the countercultural movement - liberation, freedom, and authenticity - were co-opted by corporations and advertisers, who used them to perpetuate a culture of consumption and production. Happiness became a fundamental right, something to which we’re entitled as human beings.Ī new book entitled The Happiness Fantasy by Carl Cederström, a business professor at Stockholm University, traces our current conception of happiness to its roots in modern psychiatry and the so-called Beat generation of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Individualism became the dominant ethos, with self-fulfillment and personal authenticity the highest goods. The Enlightenment and the rise of market capitalism transformed Western culture yet again. True happiness was now something to be attained in the afterlife, not on Earth. Hedonism and virtue-based morality fell somewhat out of favor, and suddenly the good life was all about sacrifice and the postponement of gratification. The rise of Christianity in the West upended Greek notions of happiness. Epicurus, another Greek philosopher who followed Aristotle, believed that happiness was found in the pursuit of simple pleasures. Happiness was a goal, something at which humans constantly aim but never quite reach. For him, happiness consisted of being a good person, of living virtuously and not being a slave to one’s lowest impulses. And no one really knows the answer, although theories abound.Īristotle was one of the first to offer what you might call a philosophy of happiness.

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