MankNotes

Monthly Unique Visitors: 16.49k Total Monthly Requests: 197.99k

The Simple Secret of Being Happy

32 min read

Foreword

Anyone who says they have a “simple secret” to anything immediately flags my snake oil detector. I think there are as many “get-happy-quick” schemes as “get-rich-quick” schemes.

Introduction

“When I was 10 years old, things started shifting between my parents and not for the better. One day, they called a family meeting… they told us that we’d be moving from our little log cabin in northern British Columbia, Canada to the southern part of the province. And that they would be divorcing… my father, Peter, had always been this happy-go-lucky guy. The divorce was extremely hard on him, and he was becoming more and more withdrawn. He was less engaged with my sisters and I, he had less energy, and I barely recognized him anymore. I remember thinking to myself, ‘is this my new dad?‘”

This sounds like depression, but I’m no doctor and good doctors don’t diagnose people over secondhand anecdotes from the Internet. Still, the Mayo Clinic has a page about signs you can observe among friends if you suspect depression, which includes “sadness, tearfulness, emptiness, or hopelessness… loss of interest of pleasure in most or all normal activities… tiredness and lack of energy… slowed thinking, speaking or body movements…” Divorce can certainly be a trigger for depression, and men demonstrate a higher risk for the first-onset of major depression after divorce than women. So, I assume this is going to be a story about the choices someone can make to combat depression in the face of tragedy that brings about the true definition of well-being according to Graham, which is resilience. Right?

“One day I woke up at his hosue… and I could hear music playing downstairs, which was very unusual… and there was my dad, Peter, dancing and making pancakes… I said ‘Wow Dad, you seem really happy today…‘”

“You know, Tia, I have had three of the worst years of my entire life, and I woke up this morning and I thought to myself, ‘I’m not going to have another bad year’.”

“I saw my dad choose happiness.”

Oh. Scrap the depression to delight story. That’s on me for being presumptuous.

People suffering from depression can end up in a vicious cycle where they lose interest and pleasure in activities they used to do, so they become less active, so there are fewer activity-reward pairings for the brain to experience, which lowers their mood further. Behavioral Activation (BA) has been one of the most evidence-backed treatments for addressing depressive symptoms. It breaks the cycle by assuming action precedes motivation and that the brain needs to regain momentum towards positive reinforcement through tiny manageable steps that grow over time.

For instance, if cleaning the house feels impossible, try putting dishes from the sink into the dishwasher, and allow yourself to celebrate that as a success. If going to the gym feels impossible, try a short walk. If your personal hygiene feels like it’s slipped out of control, just aim to put your toothbrush in your mouth or wash your face. Commit to it ahead of time like an appointment or deadline so that you’re prepared to do it regardless of your mood.

“One day at a time” and “just for today” are cliches in recovery circles that build on this concept: don’t think about never having a drink again, just focus on not having a drink for today. Reward yourself for that, and it gets easier each day to imagine staying sober.

In other words, recovering from anything, depression or addiction, tends to be a gradual progress. One does not wake up and simply choose to be happy. One can choose to try a small step towards giving your brain a little reward, which is going to be hard even as it gets a little easier each day. With a good support system, consistency towards rebuilding the systems that produce pleasure is possible. Having a good therapist can make all the difference in clarifying your values and monitoring your activities.

Remember that depression has a high rate of comorbiditiwa, and a therapist can flag something to look into with a psychiatrist. For instance, 60% of people with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) also meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder, 14% for substance use disorder, and 72% with a chronic physical condition like diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, COPD, back pain, etc. Anecdotally, this isn’t surprising at all. I’ve known at least one person for each of those conditions mentioned who has also struggled with depression. They can even be the reason someone is restricted from the usual activities that bring them pleasure, which can start the negative reinforcement cycle.

I say all this now because depression is never actually mentioned in this video, so there won’t be a discussion about the author challenging their thesis with a condition that impacts 1 in 10 US adults and 1 in 5 young adults 18-25. I imagine those are the people most likely to click on a YouTube video about achieving happiness. In fact, I find it a little concerning that Graham begins with a very realistic premise for someone suffering from depression - years of low moods and energy following the fracture of a family dynamic - but pivots into happiness simply being a choice.

“So what did he do exactly? He started doing things that he enjoyed doing. So he played upbeat music all the time. He went back to school and changed careers. He exercised outside, spent time with his horses, and he spent a lot of time with his friends.”

So, he didn’t choose to be happy. He chose a series of rather major risky life changes that resulted in happiness rather than despair because they fortunately worked out. There’s a very big difference between making a playlist of good vibes for yourself and changing careers as an older worker when you have several young children dependent on you. The first could be a reasonable starting step for BA, but the second is a major step not everyone can or should take. Only 52% of adults over the age of 25 complete a degree in 6 years, of which three-quarters achieve the initial career goals they set out for. Obviously doable, but still a risk not everyone can make. Remember that these statistics don’t include people who want to make a career change but can’t afford the risk.

“at age 18 and 19, I was really struggling, and I was not happy… I knew there had to be more to life, and I knew that I had to choose happiness for myself. This decision took me from living in Calgary, Alberta to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where I worked with children one summer…it exposed me to the travel and hospitality industries. This experience led me to a 15-year career in the hospitality industry that I was passionate about and successful in…

I don’t understand this example. I understand that Graham made a major career change just like her dad which paid off. I understand that this career was international and lucrative. I’m missing the part that connects her decision to be happy to the professional success she attained later. Notice that her language attributes agency to the decision to choose happiness for herself rather than explaining the rationale of how the move lines up with her values: “The decision took me… it exposed me…”

“Remember, I’m from a little log cabin in northern Canada.”

This is technically true, but not honest. Set aside the fact that her dad owns horses and could return to school for a career change, or that her mom returned to school prior to the divorce after being let go from her old job. According to Graham’s podcast:

“my mom and dad were living in Northern British Columbia Canada, and they were running a ski area together called Powder King Ski Resort… my grandfather, my dad’s dad was a very large investor in this company… he made an executive decision that they were going to hire a professional marketing company… my mom was no longer needed at the ski area… She is instantly thrust into survival mode and she is not okay. She decides to take us down to the southern part of British Columbia where we have a little lake house and where we’d spend some time in the summer to get away from everything.”

It’s a little disingenuous to say you’re just from a little log cabin in rural British Columbia when your family actually runs a ski resort profitable enough to afford a summer lake house. In fact, the resort has a Wikipedia page and was listed for over $8 million in 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powder_King_Mountain_Resort

“In 1983, Peter Graham Jr., president and majority shareholder in the family-owned that had operated Azu Village for the previous four years, and Peter’s then-wife Claudia, presented a $7.7 million expansion plan… A real estate development at the base of the mountain would comprise 47 single-family lots and 106 multi-family units.”

So not just running a ski resort, but planning multi-million dollar expansions to develop the real estate to hold hundreds of people. This isn’t exactly a mom-and-pop shop. It’s totally possible that the real details reveal something like a land rich, cash poor family or an heir who threw away a fortune, but “little log cabin” is implying some rags-to-riches story based on the decision to be happy.

“A happy life is not about feeling happy all the time. This is a huge misconception.”

Is it? Are people going around expecting to be happy all the time?

“Here is the simple secret of being happier: spend time doing things you really enjoy doing. Society tells us what happiness is, what happiness looks like, but what really matters is how you feel. So many people struggle with happiness… Whether it’s kids, work, finances, politics, non-stop technology, social media, family, or the never-ending 24/7 negative news cycle.”

Surveys show that at least 40% of American households do not earn enough to cover basic necessities like housing, utilities, and child care. 62% of employed professionals report feeling financially unstable or struggling to pay their bills. 83% of individuals report significant financial stress from inflation on top of the high cost of living. Some studies suggest that over 75% of doctor’s office visits are directly linked to chronic stress and related ailments like chronic inflammation. 51% of adults report regular exhaustion without explanation, 48% report lying awake at night because of racing thoughts or excessive worry, 44% suffer from tension headaches or migraines, 34% experience stomach distress related to anxiety.

36% of young adults aged 18 to 25 meet the criteria for at least one mental illness, with an unstable job market and debt as their top stressors. 66% of teens report feeling overwhelmed by the issues of climate change, economic volatility, and political polarization. 27% of adults under 30 report a lifetime depression diagnosis which has doubled since 2017. These numbers get worse in some subgroups: high school girls are twice as likely as boys to present with severe depression, over 40% of LGBTQ+ youth report feeling seriously suicidal, and over 60% of young adults of color experience at least moderate anxiety and/or depression.

My guess is that far more people are barely treading water while worrying about existential challenges to the future of human society than expecting happiness all the time in an untroubled life.

If we were being charitable, we might think this is rhetoric aligned with the critiques of positive psychology and a “happiness industry” that promotes unrealistic standards of happiness.

For context, studies show that:

  • people with negative beliefs about emotions in general tend to present with more symptoms of anxiety and depression

  • people tend to predict that events, positive or negative, will impact them more severely and for a longer duration than they actually do

  • people who strongly value being happy tend to feel less happy when in a positive mood compared to others, which can be interpreted as the result of monitoring your own happiness excessively

I would agree with the idea of treating episodes of negative experiences as normal instead of always a problem to be solved until happiness is achieved. Good listening can just mean letting someone vent while asking questions from another perspective, rather than trying to categorize and change their emotional state. The latter can come across as invalidating their reaction and proposing they should have another.

Ironically though, that’s what saying “a happy life isn’t always going to be happy” does. Imagine the depressed young adult stumbling upon this video who worries about an unstable job market and polarization in communities, only to see that massive life changes were necessary for this immensely privileged speaker to be happy even some of the time.

This is exactly why I feel it’s necessary to call out the systemic context behind the “mindset is everything”, “happiness is a choice”, “the real prison is in your mind” types of mantras. Graham had a summer lake house to process “survival mode” while most Americans are chronically stressed about paying rent or mortgages. Of course someone like Graham has to make better choices to be happy: that’s the only way their life can get better since they have all the material advantages required to not have the chronic problems most unhappy people do.

“A happy life has meaning and purpose, and a happy life has different experiences that make you psychologically rich. You think happiness comes from meeting other people and society’s expectations, but really, it comes from creating your own.”

Note that neither Graham, her dad, nor her mom were struggling with meeting social expectations before. That’s not mentioned in the TED talk, though admittedly I haven’t gone through her entire podcast to see if she elaborates elsewhere. Either way, within this video, she only mentions her father’s divorce and her own vague unhappiness that led to partying and dropping out of college. There is no elaboration on how this connects with social expectations as a driver of unhappiness. It’s just shoehorned in as a truism.

Also, it’s not a very true truism. People do tend to report greater well-being when they pursue goals that are personally meaningful rather than imposed externally, which is rather obvious: you feel better doing things you want to do than things others make you do. However, people don’t find their values or idea of meaning independently of other people and broader society. That’s yet another example of hyperindividualism that attempts to assert that there is a self or an ego that can exist in a vacuum with complete control of itself.

A 2023 study of almost 38,000 adults found that the top predictors of well-being were loneliness, satisfaction with social activities, self-rated health, financial security and success, and personality (mainly neuroticism). This is a pretty consistent finding across time. A 2004 study by Martin Seligman found that the strongest correlates of well-being are social relationships, employment, health, freedom, and trust. A 2026 study of over 148,000 adults across natinos found that an internal locus of control (belief that one has control over their life) and state of health were the most important predictors. After that, household income, marital status, in-group trust, acceptance of homosexuality, and age.

Hardly any of that is related to creating your own expectations while shunning other people and society’s expectations. The two are in an inseparable loop with each other. You can’t have meaningful relationships, social engagements, or community participation without aligning yourself with the environment around you. That also means having the courage and responsibility to accept your agency over the environment and act on it.

But there’s no simple secret to addressing loneliness or financial insecurity. That requires social reform, which is hard and controversial, unlike TED talks which explicitly seek simple ideas to spread in 10-minute presentations. We’ll see what kind of literature she does end up referencing instead pretty shortly.

“I personally struggle to feed my family three times a day, seven days a week, every single week. I am not a good cook, and I don’t like cooking. Obviously, I would never make it on Top Chef. Bottom Chef called and said ‘don’t even bother.‘”

First of all, meal prepping isn’t hard. It’s a habit to learn like anything else. You can freeze some meals for months and they’ll still taste great when you reheat them. There are countless guides to do this online. My college had workshops to teach students about budget meal prepping. This is a solved problem.

Second of all, notice how “struggle” here went from “kids, work, finances, politics, non-stop technology, social media, family, or the never-ending 24/7 negative news cycle” to finding it inconvenient to assign yourself the task of making fresh meals from scratch three times a day for a family? We went from external threats to your peace and security to what I assume is an attempt to come across as relatable to unhappy middle-class moms, which is kind of her whole brand.

“Gallup’s research showed that 79% of people, globally, are disengaged while they’re working. That’s almost 80% of people. Many people are doing work that they don’t like or that’s not meaningful to them. Also, according to Gallup’s global research, 41% of people have a lot of stress and worry on a regular basis. The World Health Organization said one in four are not getting enough execise, and the term ‘work-life balance’ has over 2.8 billion search results on Google. And your brain, my brain, all of our brains have a negativity bias, which is really unfortunate. We have to work extra hard to be positive and optimistic.”

Notice that being disengaged with work is considered a proxy for unhappiness or lack of purpose. Why? You’ve never had a job you did just for a paycheck so you could enjoy the rest of your life or at least try to achieve basic security?

For those who don’t know, TED Talks have a reputation for being the kind of content that managers show employees when they want to avoid making any systemic changes in the workplace if boosting morale and positivity can fix it. Spoilers: it can’t. As Demings said, a bad system beats a good person every time. If you want people to be engaged in the workplace, give them engaging incentives. That’s as obvious a principle as “do things you enjoy in order to enjoy life more” or “do esteemable things if you want self-esteem.”

Also, our negativity bias isn’t necessarily “unfortunate.” It likely developed because paying more attention to threats and losses than rewards can be a good strategy for survival. You can run out of food and starve to death, but you can’t somehow eat more food now to avoid eating later, so loss can have more significance than gain. We might say that a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Optimism is not in and of itself something desirable, it’s just a proxy that can tell us something about your general mental state.

“I’m going to share with you four things that many people really enjoy doing. I’m going to connect them to the science of happiness. And I want you to think about these for yourself.”

Happiness Choice Number One

“Happiness choice number one- Spend a lot of quality time with your friends and your family…The Harvard Grant Study of Adult Development, an over-80-year study, proved that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships directly affect our health and our happiness.”

Setting aside the technical issues with the word “proved”, we see that Graham does in fact use the same literature I referenced above, with seemingly no awareness of how it contradicts the idea of creating expectations from within yourself instead of meeting those of other people and society.

You cannot have a happy marriage if you disregard your spouse’s expectations of you. You cannot be a good parent if you disregard your children’s expectations of you. You cannot keep a job if you disregard your employer’s expectations of you. You cannot sell to customers if you disregard the customers’ expectations of you. Simply put, you can either have relationships or you can be be a lone wolf, but you can’t be both. You can absolutely negotiate expectations within a relationship to align yours with another’s, but the fact they exist is an inescapable fact of life.

A 2022 study examined the 2003-2020 American Time Use Survey and found that nationally, social isolation increased while social engagement and companionship decreased. The COVID quarantines only accelerated consistent trends we observed. The study specifically highlights that “Hours worked per week emerged as a structural constraint to social connectedness.” So people who have to work more to make ends meet are less likely to spend time with their friends; remember that 40% of Americans don’t make enough to afford basic needs. That hardly seems like a choice someone can change.

Here’s a quick thought experiment: imagine that no one in the world had to work for a living at all, and basic needs are completely provided through a magic wand. How many people do you think would choose to keep doing exactly what they’re doing now, and how many people would quit to spend time with loved ones and/or traveling the world to meet new people?

Happiness Choice Number Two

“Happiness choice number two is getting a good night’s sleep. This means sleeping seven to nine hours a night, every single night. Research shows that sleep increases our happiness, improves our brain functioning, and improves our overall quality of life. So even though those streaming shows are so good or even though you could stay up just one more hour, just answer a few more emails, go to bed and leave your phone in the kitchen.”

Remember above that we talked about a vicious cycle, and how half of Americans lose sleep because of racing thoughts and excessive worry about the future? There are two main ways to interpret the combination of these facts. Either the use of technology before bed causes racing thoughts and worry which then prompts more technology use as a distraction, or people stressed about their lives can’t sleep use screens while lying in bed awake.

One 2025 meta-analysis looked at 21 studies with almost 550,000 participants. Each hour of daily screen time was associated with 3-5 minutes less sleep and 13.2 minutes of delay in bedtime. In 2024, a review of 25 studies across 4652 participants found that “daily screen time has a small” correlation with delayed sleep time, and “short-term daily fluctuations in screen time appear to have minimal impact on sleep duration, efficiency, or quality. Screen time may delay bedtime but is not inherently detrimental to other aspects of sleep health in youth.”

Another 2025 meta-analysis that looked at about 4,200 adults across 42 randomized controlled trials found that sleep hygiene education (SHE) produces only weak to modest impacts on insomnia relative to other approaches. Partial Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), exercise, and accupressure all outperform sleep hygiene as factors in alleviating insomnia.

So overall, evidence shows that if you want completely optimal sleep, then improving sleep hygiene and cutting down on screen time can help. However, the top predictors of physician-diagnosed insomnia, according to a 2023 analysis that examined 684 variables, seem to be depression symptoms, age, a physician recommendation to exercise, weight, and waist circumference. In fact, depression symptoms contribute four times as much as age and ten times as much as body weight.

Another study aimed at subjective sleep quality instead of diagnosed insomnia found that the 38 objective variables analyzed for over 1400 adults could only explain 11-17% of the variance. In other words, factors other than sleep efficiency (percent of time spent in bed asleep), total sleep time, and number of sleep stage transitions are primarily responsible for subjective sleep quality.

It seems that symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress, age, body composition, physical health, and dysfunctional beliefs about sleep are consistently the biggest predictors we find. Screen time does appear to have a modest effect on sleep quality, duration, and efficiency but sleep hygiene overall isn’t that impactful. Depression, on the other hand, has an incredibly massive impact.

The evidence suggests, at least to me, that people are struggling with sleep for reasons unrelated to their screen time and turn to technology for something to do in bed. Once you notice how often communicators leap from loose associations to strong prescriptions, it’s hard to unsee.

Happiness Choice Number 3

“Happiness choice number three - Moving at least four times a week. Exercise increases our happiness, increases our brain functioning, and decreases stress and anxiety. Do not exercise to look good; exercise to be happier. And I know you’re busy. You don’t need to do an hour workout class. Even if you move 15, 20 minutes, you will get the benefit.”

Exercise is definitely associated with increased happiness and decreased stress and anxiety, particularly in individuals who have more of both. The encouragement to move even 15 or 20 minutes is largely in line with the tiny steps I mentioned above as part of Behavioral Activation. This is probably the most defensible recommendation in the talk.

It should be noted though that the relationship between depression and exercise is bidirectional. Depression is associated with becoming physically inactive over time, and people with higher physical activity are less likely to develop depression. 40% of respondents to the CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) cite a lack of time as their primary issue, and as many as 25% cite health problems or disabilities as an obstacle. Remember that over half of American adults report exhaustion without a clear explanation.

Also, I haven’t been pointing out how interconnected these issues are. Someone worried about making ends meet is more likely to pick up more hours, which means anxiety and a higher workload will both be contributing to less sleep. They might also have to cut out social engagement activities that doubled as physical activity. That can lead to more health complications like an increase in the symptoms of anxiety and depression or aggravation of another underlying health condition like hypertension. It’s easy to see someone spiral into that vicious cycle we mentioned before.

The gap between the highest-income adults and lowest-income adults in terms of meeting aerobic activity recommendations is about 20%, strongly suggesting that more financial security enables healthier lifestyle choices. Is that really surprising to anyone? Keep in mind these statistics include the fact that lower-income groups have more physical activity at work while higher-income groups incorporate more recreational exercise. Someone who works over 40 hours a week in a warehouse is probably not going to have the energy to hit the gym after or in the middle of the workday. For contrast, I’ve had a lot of meetings with at least one coder walking on a treadmill placed under their standing desk or squeezing in a home gym routine around lunch.

Happiness Choice Number 4

“Research shows that meaningful work makes us happier and way more motivated while we’re working and makes us happier in our personal life. And if you don’t have the opportunity right now to change jobs or change careers, just spend more time helping people, and your work will be more meaningful.”

From a Pew Research Center survey, 55% of American workers considering job changes were concerned about losing income, and 45% were concerned about losing benefits like healthcare. 50% of adults involved in some type of education or training report a lack of time due to work and family obligations as a barrier to their advancement. 20-30% of adults considering further education and training also have caregiving responsibilities. Women on average spent roughly twice as much time on caregiving for children than men, while men on average spend more hours working to support a household financially. As I said before, this type of career change is certainly doable, but definitely not equitably distributed.

As for helping people, there have been studies on something called “task significance” which tracks the belief that one’s work has an impact on others, but studies show it accounts for 14% of the variation in job satisfaction. In other words, it can definitely help yourself feel better to help others feel better, but you are heavily constrained in this by the parameters of your workplace. Also, if you have ever worked anything even closely resembling customer service, you’re probably laughing a little bit at the idea that you would be happier if only you tried to be more helpful.

Note that the solution being proposed is asking you to do more work with a positive attitude to feel better. It’s almost like positivity propaganda, and it’s not hard to see why managers might share this with their employees.

Conclusion

“There are many other happiness choices, such as spending time in nature, meditating, volunteering, journaling when you’re going through pain. It’s about you.”

There’s a rhetorical sleight of hand here where self-care that’s central to your health is being conflated with a “happiness choice.” These are entirely different things. There’s a really big distinction between reducing negative moods, increasing positive moods, increasing life satisfaction, and increasing a sense of meaning or purpose.

Also, the literature shows that all of these have small to moderate impacts on well-being on average. There seems to be an assumption that happiness is a linear combination of the “happiness choices” listed above. If you add up all the small changes, a big change must necessarily happen that puts you into the “happy life” category, right?

No. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there has been substantial criticism from scholars lately about this exact framing. Nicholas J.L. Brown & Julia M. Rohrer provide an incredibly comprehensive breakdown of the assumptions behind the “happiness pie” model that proposed 40% of our happiness can be attributed to individual actions in our control. I couldn’t possibly add anything in the way of commentary to the substance of the work, so I’ll shamelessly cite them directly:

“Consequently, there is little reason to believe that 40% is a reliable estimate of the variance in chronic happiness attributable to intentional activity—for example, if Lyubomirsky et al. had chosen a different (but, in our view, at least equally plausible) set of estimates, they might just as easily have concluded that as little as (100% − 80% − 15% = 5%) of variance in chronic happiness can be attributed to volitional activities. Of course, because of the conceptual issues that we have discussed, we do not believe that such an estimate would necessarily be more reasonable or more interpretable.”

They also include a sharper critique of the point about privilege I made before:

“Likewise, researchers should carefully reconsider the usage of terms such as “volitional activities”. What might be a matter of choice for some people can be a question of circumstances for others.”

“For example, middle-class Western parents with a comfortable household income can exercise a wide range of choice over the diet that they and their children consume; they can choose to drive their car to the farmer’s market instead of taking the bus to the discount grocery store, and afford to place organic blueberries rather than canned, syrup-laden fruit cocktail in their shopping cart. They can also enjoy a wide range of recreational activities, such as vacations to awe-inspiring or culturally important destinations, enabling them to enjoy the benefits of feeling that they are part of a meaningful world (Gilovich and Kumar 2015).”

“Indeed, Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) themselves described the types of volitional activities that they were considering in decidedly middle-class terms: “rather than running on a track, a fitness-seeking wilderness lover might instead choose to run on a trail through the woods… rather than learning classical pieces, a jazz-loving piano student might instead choose to work on jazz standards” (p. 122).”

Just like I said above, Graham’s examples also seem to be marketed at the middle-class moms (though these days we might say upper-middle class) whose idea of “struggle” might mean making three fresh meals everyday rather than affording subsistence-level meal prepping. Graham, like many get-happy-quick gurus, is just marketing “happiness circumstances” as “happiness choices” for the particular demographic whose circumstances allow them to make those choices.

“A subsistence farmer working from dawn to dusk in a developing nation, a worker who spends 14 h per day assembling electronic devices in a south-east Asian factory, or a single Western parent living in less fortunate circumstances than the family just mentioned, may not be in a position to make such choices. As with many phenomena studied by primarily Western psychologists (cf. Henrich et al. 2010), the list of volitional activities that are available to improve one’s well-being may be less than universal, not just for cultural reasons but also precisely because of one’s life circumstances.”

Anecdotally, if you ever want to make it really awkward in a room where someone is promoting a viewpoint from positive psychology, just bring up racism or sexism or another -ism. Ask what kind of self-care or volitional activities you need to offset the circumstances of systemic bigotry to your wellbeing. I have never once seen this point handled gracefully or tactfully, because the premise of this worldview is that you have freedom through consumer choice and the civil rights afforded by a liberal democracy. In practice, your freedom is limited by your access to capital, whether financial or political.

As someone from an Indian and Hindu background, my grandparents were alive to witness the liberation of Goa from Portuguese rule, a struggle that lasted from the 1490s to the 1960s. A huge misconception about Indian independence is that Gandhi and friends held peaceful hunger strikes with his best friend Martin Luther King Jr. that made the British and Americans feel silly enough to stop being racist and give rights. In practice, European powers stayed long after the 1947 deal for independence was struck. For 14 years, nonviolent and diplomatic attempts to negotiate the freedom of Goa from a Portguese dictatorship continued. It became an international affair that involved the UN, US, UK, Brazil, Mexico, and other parties with a stake in either India or Portugal.

In November of 1961, Portguese troops shot at a passenger boat and killed one while injuring the chief engineer. This was far from the only death that had happened since 1947 among unarmed nonviolent Indians in proximity to Goa, but it became an inflection point where enough was enough. By December, Prime Minister Nehru declared that the era of peaceful negotiation and adaptation to the occupying forces was over: “Continuance of Goa under Portguese rule is an impossibility.”

Prime Minister Salazar of the Portuguese had ordered “there will be no surrender rendered because I feel that our soldiers and sailors can be either victorious or dead.” Governor General Manuel Vassalo e Silva told the press “If necessary, we wil die here.” The Portguese President had ordered a scorched earth policy, so that Goa was to be destroyed before being conceded to India. This is the kind of detail that’s important to remember when discussing the conditions of developing nations and formerly colonialized territories.

The United States, both outside and inside the forum of the United Nations, was critical of India’s use of force for independence, which is rather ironic considering how the US obtained independence. Go listen to Hamilton if you’ve forgotten. On the other hand, the USSR had vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have condemned India’s liberation of Goa. Brezhnev criticized the response of Western institutions as coming “from those who are accustomed to strangle the peoples striving for independence… and from those who enrich themselves from colonialist plunder.”

Operation Vijay took 36 hours to force the Portuguese to surrender. 14 years of diplomatic resolution and adaptation was nowhere near as effective as just acting decisively and collectively against an obvious injustice.

My ancestors did not improve their lives by incorporating more exercise or turning off the TV sooner before bedtime when they didn’t even have the consistent electricity to have a fridge. They organized collectively to challenge institutions and force changes that they were told they would never be able to make. That created political and financial capital by recognizing community rather than the individual ego as the fundamental unit of human society. Individuals repeatedly made sacrifices to benefit the collective with the understanding that they were investing in the future prosperity of those who would one day call them ancestors. That gives meaning, purpose, and a place in the world. You cannot know what you can or cannot change until you try your absolute best to change it, and your absolute best only comes out when you’re working with people who empower each other.

All this to say, I have a very different frame of reference for what counts as “struggle” or “survival mode” than no longer having a job in a lucrative family business or wanting to cook three fresh meals every day. Perhaps the radically individualist positive psychology of “happiness choices” works for those who have reaped the benefits of colonialism to give themselves that choice. It doesn’t seem to work as well for those on the receiving end of it.

Links

Graph View

Backlinks