Self-Help: The (Self-)Cure of the 21st Century

In the above context, known as the "happiness turn" (^{Ahmed, 2010}), the practices and discourses of positive psychology, coaching, and self-help have proliferated. By resorting to them we self-administer well-being, we try to temporarily calm a malaise that we have not yet clearly identified, and we weave a modus vivendi that gradually makes the pursuit of happiness its central axis, the selling of which has created a multimillion-dollar market of its own. In this sense, ^{Brito et al. (2020)} insist on the normalizing effect that "self-help" has on the subjectivities of neoliberal citizens. As ^{Cabanas and Huertas (2014)} explain, both positive psychology and self-help defend the search for happiness as something inherent to the human condition.

And that's precisely what self-help bestsellers do, like the one by ^{Neil Pasricha (2016)}, in which he proclaims that he aims to "find the exact equation of happiness," and attempts to do so with the following proposition: BEING HAPPY → GREAT WORK → GREAT SUCCESS. "What is the first thing you must do before you can be happy? Be happy. Be happy first." In short, he sells us a lie based on a fallacy: happiness is achieved with... happiness. The rigorous reflection of ^{Pérez-Álvarez (2016)} showed that indeed "felicitous is fallacious"², and that the theoretical weakness of positive psychology is just as present in the “happyist” commodification of self-help. Mo Gawdat, former commercial director of Google, explains in his book that "the simplest way for an engineer to express the definition of happiness is a mathematical expression: the happiness algorithm" (^{Gawdat, 2018}). Happiness ≥ Your perception of events - Expectations. "Meaning that if you perceive something equivalent to or better than your expectations, you are happy; or, at least, you are not unhappy." Victor Küppers, a speaker who masterfully imparts the dogma of positive psychology, also has his own formula: V = (K + S) x A. Where K is Knowledge, S is Skills, and A is Attitude. V is a person’s Value. The founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, proposed in his book "Authentic Happiness" an equation that attempted to solve the conundrum "Can you be happier in a lasting way?" It went like this: H = S + C + V. "In which H is your enduring level of happiness, S your set point, C the circumstances of your life, and V voluntary variables" (^{Seligman, 2002, p. 79}). Interestingly, years later he changed his own formula.

How to be Happy: An Overly Positive Education

Obviously, education is a very important area for the institutionalization of happiness. Thus, we have gradually entered a new form of "immaterial production" in which not only technical knowledge (hard skills) and the possession of information are valued, but also emotional competencies (soft skills). What is most valued, today—because of their capacity for development, their inimitability, and their "competitive advantage" (^{Luthans et al., 2007})—are the psychological (or personal) resources of individuals, such as attitude, emotional intelligence, personal strengths, and psychological capital. For some authors, all this shows that we have entered a new type of capitalism that, beyond information (^{Zuboff, 2015}), focuses and operates on the emotions (^{Illouz, 2019}).

The Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania was the first in the world to offer a degree in this field of study under the supervision of Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of the discipline of positive psychology and creator of the program. Since then, a multitude of similar master's degrees have proliferated in different parts of the world such as England, South Africa, Australia, and Europe. Interestingly, all of them opt for an online model that allows lifelong learning in positive psychology anywhere in the world without leaving home, as long as you can pay the university fees that range from 2,650 euros to 71,944 U.S. dollars.

The same academic institutions are behind the creation and commoditization of more affordable options for the general public such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on happiness. The University of California created the first eight-week online course, called The Science of Happiness, which is currently offered through the EdX platform. Yale University offers its course, The Science of Well-Being, through Coursera. The prestigious Harvard University did not take long to consolidate positive psychology classes with Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, founder of the Happiness Studies Academy through which he sells the Certificate in Happiness Studies and the Master of Arts in Happiness Studies at Centenary University.

In addition to all this, the obsession with the study of happiness has already filtered into primary and secondary education with proposals such as The Happier School Program in the United States, the Happy School Program in Australia and New Zealand, or the Aulas Felices [Happy Classrooms] program (^{Arguís et al., 2010}) and the Programa de Felicidad en las Escuelas [Happiness in Schools Program] in Spain.

A Happy Worker is a Productive Worker

Happiness, well-being, and the emotional are the new playing field for capitalization and wealth generation: large corporations and institutions invest in emotions, seek their profitability, accumulate them, and sell them. They use them as a product to generate a surplus value in addition to that generated by information and the circulation of goods. In line with neoliberal capitalism, psychological capital is located in positive organizational psychology, that is, in the world of work and organizations, which is where the most money moves. Under the Happy-Productive Worker theory (^{Lucas & Diener, 2003}), it is proposed to work happily to improve productivity and "gain a competitive advantage" (^{Luthans et al., 2007}). This translates into the emergence of a new work ethic in which the employee is the one who should consider work as a space for self-realization and development of personal skills (^{Cabanas & Sánchez-González, 2012}). Entrusting the individual with the entire management of his or her internal world benefits the company because it involves less investment in external control and supervision, while the autonomy of the worker is presented as related to his or her well-being and personal satisfaction (^{Pérez-Álvarez et al., 2018}).

In fact, positive psychology establishes a link between mental health and success (^{Lyubomirsky et al., 2005}) and explains that health is closely linked to capital, justifying in literally economic terms what is called an Operational Return on Investment, that is, an amount of monetary resources that is saved in the use of health services or that returns in other ways, as in the case of increased productivity in companies. According to the World Economic Forum, the value of this return is calculated at 2.97 euros per euro invested in Happiness Programs in companies. In this new paradigm, Maslow's Pyramid has been inverted (^{Cabanas & Sánchez-González, 2016}), since being happy is today a necessary basic requirement that every worker must show in order to be hired and to achieve success. Unfortunately, this logic is part of an economic, social, and cultural phenomenon that extends far beyond business.

The Leisure Business: The Happy-ism of Privacy

^{Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987)} anticipated decades ago that the characteristic of modern societies would be an excess of communication, generating, paradoxically, with this activity an absence of creativity and a widespread normalization of socially accepted behaviors, such as giving the appearance of well-being and happiness. It is evident that constant communication facilitates the continuous (re)construction of symbols and meanings, but what is more relevant is that it also creates the permanent need for the very exercise of such communication (communicatio; to put in common). This leads to what ^{Han (2013)} calls the "dictatorship of transparency", which is the essential characteristic of our present time. In it, we voluntarily make ourselves visible and all the information we produce through each of our daily actions through the technological devices that accompany us (cell phones, smart watches, biometric bracelets, etc.) is collected and segmented to build global psychographies that are projected into the future. This Big Data promotes that our health is constantly measured and that everything becomes some kind of data through reminders, publications, advertisements, and apps. For example, an app like Happify installed on your smartphone can launch a pop-up that tells you that you have to perform some daily well-being practice, and after that, it allows you to publish (publicus; make public) the fact that you have done it. The movement called Quantified Self, which aims to increase physical, mental, and spiritual performance through self-measurement is a good example of this (^{Lupton, 2016}; ^{Nafus & Sherman, 2014}). Knowing oneself, self-help, and self-care are precisely the things that generate material and elements to continuously communicate and exhibit oneself to others. From the point of view of some authors (^{Illouz, 2019}; ^{Lazzarato, 2012}), this need involves nothing more than the implementation of a new mechanism of self-exploitation that has in the generation of information the main vehicle and in our own subjectivity the beginning and end of the horizon of that process. This permanent generation of information about ourselves that is expressed in computer applications that we use every day such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and that opens a space for total communication is like the panopticon (the all-seeing eye) described by ^{Foucault (2007)} as a mechanism of control. The only difference is that now the gaze of a physical eye does not operate, but rather the constant production and circulation of information among very broad communities of individuals and institutions. An integral commodification of existence is taking place through campaigns such as those of Nocilla with its "happiness of the good kind" or Coca-Cola with its "uncover happiness" that use "happiness" to promote their products. In addition, we also see that cinema, art, series, and travel offers have joined this positive trend as the discourse of well-being (or "being well") is booming more than ever. As we have observed, leisure has become business, and our private life has also become controlled by "happiness".

The Universalization of Happiness

As the previous historical vignettes show, public and private organizations have been making happiness a universal standard and goal for years. However, happiness is not understood in the same way in different parts of the world, and not all people seek it, nor do they all do so in the same way. We have been led to believe that the pursuit of happiness is a universal imperative, so solutions have been created to satisfy this generated need.

Because of this (self-)imposed obligation by governments, by institutions, and by "happiness scientists", mechanisms are being deployed on a global scale that promote the generation and massive collection of data on the emotional states of countries and individuals in order to create even more tools for social control.

The simple and obvious observation that while first world countries seek and sell happy experiences, developing countries still struggle for survival practically anchored in medieval situations, shows that this is a concept that is difficult to universalize.

The Privatization of Happiness

Paradoxically, this universalization falls into the hands of a few: large corporations and private institutions. Happiness "for all" is opening an important economic niche in the 21st century, and for this reason it is essential to universalize it, while keeping the product privatized and under the control of large corporations.

As we have seen, all kinds of institutions do this. Governments use "happiness" as a populist policy to positively unmark their proposals and give them a touch of added value with the excuse of trying to make their citizens happier. That is the governance of happiness: it deprives the people of it in order to then grant it from a position of power. Obviously, private institutions have also realized how profitable it is to capitalize on intangible products such as the emotions, and they are privatizing "happiness". With the excuse of researching it, self-styled "Happiness Institutes" are being created, which are nothing more than groups of self-proclaimed independent "experts" whose self-imposed mission is to inform decision-makers about the causes and effects of human happiness, to make subjective well-being part of the debate on public policies and to improve the general quality of life of citizens around the world.

In academia, the implicit logic is to be trained in happiness in order to be able to teach other people how to be happy. Therefore, the following question should come as no surprise: What do all happiness training courses have in common? The answer is that they are all endorsed by the institutions themselves (i.e., they are unofficial courses) and mostly supported by private universities. Having to pay exorbitant tuition to study how to be happy is the same as having to buy happiness, a privatization that not everyone is able or willing to accept.

The Scientification of Happiness

If anything characterizes our present time, it is that science has become an endeavor that prioritizes the maximization of profitability. The thirst for research has shaped a new knowledge society that has submerged essential areas of life in a scientific turn, and it can exercise power over these areas to manage societies, relationships between people, and ways of being in the world. Specifically, as the study and dissemination of happiness is left to a mere few, the science of happyism must recognize that the constructs it creates and promotes may cause undesirable effects. To mitigate these effects, it is necessary that the way of producing, conceiving, and transmitting knowledge be done within an ethical and political prism.

Undoubtedly, positive psychology is prescriptive since with its scientific study of happiness it anticipates needs and tells us how we should live. But as has been shown, this so-called "science of happiness" suffers from important theoretical weaknesses ^{Pérez-Álvarez (2016)}. To begin with, happiness is a syncategorematic concept, i.e., its meaning depends on other terms, and this is the gap that positive psychology is attempting to fill with its scientific experiments. Moreover, happiness is not a static object of study of natural science, it is something human that should be observed at least under the gaze of the social sciences. In short, there is no need for a "science of happiness" for the common sense advice that it "discovers", but its proponents insist on scientifying it so that we buy their results.

In fact, Barbara Fredrickson herself, one of the most renowned researchers in positive psychology, recognized the failure of mathematical equations misapplied to her field (^{Fredrickson, 2013}). The question we should ask ourselves is not whether there is a happiness algorithm or not, but whether the mere act of formulating it this way could be a mechanism to sell the aforementioned happiness imperative. The great miscalculation of self-help is to try to give mathematical solutions to problems that are not mathematical, because it falls into a generalism that instead of clearing up unknowns, multiplies doubts. Besides, what are the consequences of trying to calculate the value of people? What is clear is that positive psychology makes a strong commitment to and promotion of the importance of psychological capital and its scientification.

The Blackboxing of Happiness

^{Bruno Latour (2021)} uses the term "blackboxing" to describe the process by which something becomes invisible because of its own success. That is to say, when a fact is culturally consensual and well established, as is the case of "happiness" rooted to the core of today's society, we focus only on the benefits it generates and not on the mechanisms that make it work. Thus, paradoxically, any concept studied under the umbrella of "science" becomes more opaque the more successful it is.

And since the triumph of the governance of happiness has become more than evident (literally, government models are being patented to create happier societies) in all areas of everyday life, and since everyday life is not problematized because it is intrinsically taken for granted by the fact of being common and ordinary; "happiness" has become clearly blackboxed. This process of automation of successful mechanisms must be studied within sociology or, preferably, within the social psychology of science and technology to understand how "the human" and the "non-human" establish the boundaries between "the social" and "the natural", interactions that day by day build and maintain the categories to which we are subjected and from which it is difficult for us to escape.

We should try to unblackbox happiness by posing complex hypotheses about its operating systems and being more reflective about its modes of application and implications. In the case of "happiness", it is legitimate and necessary to ask whether the results obtained by the institutions that promote it are "constructed" or "real", since there always has been and there always will be a connection between politics and natural science.