Worse, despite the tight correlation existing between escalating rates of depression and the social disorders of the present – unemployment, poverty, housing insecurity – we have seen a further pathologising of misery. Smile or Die is how some have described that pressure to show a cheerful face start frowning and you may well lose your job, especially in the burgeoning service sector – however insecure and underpaid your employment. Moreover, there are reasons to suspect that the current stress on happiness itself promotes new forms of social anxiety and control. Measures of ‘happiness’ are thus being collected and fed back to us despite, or is it because of, misery and foreboding all around us, feeding dystopic visions that become only ever more compelling when imagining the future. Read an excerpt from Segal’s piece below, or the full text here. While the former is ultimately concerned with seeking personal advantage in a competitive marketplace, the latter is de-individualizing and potentially revolutionary. At the Verso blog, Lynne Segal, author of Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, contrasts individual happiness-which is the focus of “happiness studies” and the tech-aided “self-optimization” movement-with collective joy.
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