Happiness is simply not the appropriate response to many situations in life, says Brinkmann, whose Danish bestseller Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze is published in English by international publisher Polity this month. Even worse, faking it can leave us emotionally stunted.[...]
There’s nothing wrong with those who have a naturally sunny disposition or who enjoy the odd self-help book, says Brinkmann. The problem is when happiness becomes a requisite. In the workplace, for example, where performance reviews often insist on focusing on positive growth rather than genuine difficulties, demanding displays of happiness is “almost totalitarian.” Brinkmann likens insistence on employee happiness to “thought control.”
In the US, mandatory happiness became the subject of an official workplace ruling against T-Mobile in May 2016, where the National Labor Review Board determined that employers cannot force employees to be consistently cheery. All the same, many companies spend huge sums of money trying to ensure employee happiness, and not out of altruism. “When you engage with people and you work in teams, then these personality traits become much more important. That’s why we put much more emphasis on them, because we want to exploit humans and their emotional lives,” says Brinkmann. “I think this is a dark side of positivity. Our feelings tend to become commodities and that means we’re very easily alienated from our feelings.”
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