“Happy Thanksgiving” and “Happy Holidays”set the bar higher than “Have a Nice Day,” but these are relatively easy wishes. “Happy New Year” is a big ask.
New Year’s wishes are traditionally wishes for good luck. Foods are eaten and rituals undertaken to help bring it. Resolutions have ancient roots in promises made to the heavens in exchange for it. Americans, led to believe we make our own luck, tend to think of New Year’s resolutions not as wishes but as promises to ourselves to make shit happen: I’m going to do the things on this list to make my life better this year. On the one hand, this means we don’t have to rely on luck. On the other, it means we have to get to work.
I haven’t made resolutions in a long time. Eating more cruciferous vegetables was a perennial list item back in the day, which may explain why I ceased being resolute as the years kept turning. My husband and I spent this New Year’s weekend with old friends; when one asked if any in the group were making resolutions, there were hems and haws before the conversation moved on.
I am Challenged to a Happiness Competition
This week, The New York Times threw down this gauntlet: “The 7-Day Happiness Challenge: Try these simple steps for a joyful, more connected 2023.” I would normally scroll right by anything with so many self-help tropes in the headline, but the piece began with a quiz, and I’m a sucker for a quiz.
The quiz asked a series of questions about my relationships with family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and I absolutely aced it, assuming there is nothing tippier or toppier than “tip-top.” 2023 had launched with a resounding success! I was already happy! Well, not exactly. Here’s the feedback I got:
After being told I was in fantastic “social shape” (I’ll return to this language later), I was immediately given a job — to do more. Simply doing what I’d been been doing right was not enough. I had new things to do, new and uncomfortable things. These slightly painful, disagreeable things would be specifically suggested later. I could hardly wait. (Actually, I could wait, writing this without having seen all of them; there are several days left.)
The quiz and the Challenge are all about relationships. The Times relies for its understanding of happiness on the Harvard Study of Adult Development, from which it tells us “one very clear finding has emerged: Strong relationships are what make for a happy life.” The newspaper’s choice to focus on social life as the key to happiness in 2023 follows three pandemic years of media discourse on whether Americans are socializing enough.
The past few weeks alone have produced a flurry of anxious pieces occasioned by the release of the latest American Time Use survey, which showed us spending more time alone, a trend that began before the pandemic. Some economists seem particularly upset by the survey. These are some of the same people insisting that in-person schooling and in-office work were essential to our mental health, although some data, like trends in youth suicide, suggests otherwise. One key problem, of course, is conflating being alone with being lonely. Another is assuming the social world we live in is one that is healthy for each and all of us.
The quiz was interesting. I was rewarded for having a positive opinion of my social and communication skills, used as a proxy for the quality of my relationships. Being born into a large family, having had six decades in which to have accumulated friends, a history as a career changer, and the nature of my work enabled me to answer many of the quantitative questions (how many friends?) in ways that boosted my score. The quiz assumed I had a job, but as part of the Great Resignation, I was forced to answer the question about my relationships at work as I might have in years past.
Though some questions took account of personal preferences (“Do you feel satisfied with the number of close friends that you have?”), the quiz overall rewarded extroversion: both in the sense of a desire to spend a lot of time with other people and the ability to accomplish this. What the Challenge ultimately offers, of course, are ways to make it happen. What is taken for granted is that what we all want and need — introvert or extrovert, young or old, single or married, working or not — is more.
Undoubtedly, the 7-Day Happiness Challenge will help some of the newspaper’s readers improve their social lives and, along with that, their happiness, not because the recommendations are groundbreaking but because they serve as reminders in our busy lives of some of what’s important. Ideas underpin the piece that I resist, however, and are worth interrogating.
My resistance started with the language. “Social shape” comes from a book the Times references by Dr. Bob Waldinger and Marc Schulz, The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. (Dr. Waldinger helped create the Times piece.) The authors, experts in psychiatry and psychology, coined the term “social fitness,” likening our social life to our physical body, something we can whip into shape, and, by implication, something we can use to stack up wins. All I had to show for going for those Presidential Physical Fitness Awards in gym were blisters and a participation badge, but I swear that’s not why I’m bitter — or wary. Many find their social worlds unhealthily competitive already. This is especially true for young people, subject to constant feedback on their academic pursuits through online grade books and on their social desirability through social media.
Yes, health is physical and mental, and it is well established that social ties are important to mental health, so the coinage makes sense. Unfortunately, the metaphor facilitates the immediate leap to contemporary forms of goal-setting. Once upon a time you might make a New Year’s resolution to “walk more,” and to do this, you might decide to start walking to errands less than a mile away. Today you can track everything on your phone, set specific daily and weekly targets for number of steps, number of calories burned, number of minutes active. And I know people who, rather than feel good about having walked several brisk miles in a day, beat themselves up for not making their 10,000 steps, a widely-publicized number we now know to have been pulled out of thin air by a businessperson.
Other language in the quiz feedback is corporate speak. I need to “double down,” a business metaphor borrowed from high-stakes gambling; to be “proactive,” an overused résumé word; and to get out of my “comfort zone,” a term employed by management consultant Alasdair White to describe a business phenomenon grounded in pop psychology.
I Relate the “Challenge” to Education Because Of Course I Do
I have no problem generally with goal-setting. Leaving aside whether meeting them made me happy, I wouldn’t have achieved many of my academic or professional successes without having decided in advance to try to make them happen. At the same time, a great deal of layered privilege brought me experiences I never set goals for, such as an international job assignment, that were some of my life’s most rewarding.
In my different careers as a marketer, an investment banker, and an educator, I was asked to set annual goals. This was good. It forced me to pause and reflect on my learning about where and how to make my contribution more meaningful. It was especially helpful when I began teaching, when too many responsibilities made prioritizing essential. During my first decade as a teacher, the kind of goal-setting I was asked to do was useful; it required a narrative about trying a new methodology or new curricular materials. Importantly, I was evaluated holistically on my work throughout the year with students, colleagues, and community.
Then came the effort to remake education in the image of business, brought to an absurd apex in Obama’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top. Suddenly, my goals were no longer my own and had to be data-driven. I was only supposed to prioritize what could be measured quantitatively.
Teaching is both an art and a science. Students are humans. At H.J. Heinz, I could put a number on the effectiveness of a coupon in reaching new customers. At Staples High School, I had to keep a grade book, but I could not put a number on my students’ satisfaction in realizing they understood a naughty line of Shakespeare’s or on their insight into a current event based on an earth-shaking Richard Wright essay.
Though the data-driven teacher evaluation systems spawned by Race to the Top have proven a failure, and resulted in some schools narrowing curriculum to teach to standardized tests, they live on in many districts. (I’ve written elsewhere about the warping of education under these systems.) Some persist in pushing on their teachers a version of SMART goals, a 1980s framework developed by a corporate planner.
Teachers haven’t been pushing back for over a decade on the concept of setting goals, of measuring what can and should be meaningfully measured, or on accountability. They have been pushing back on the concept of treating education like a business, of applying economic ideology and business practices to activities of the heart and soul.
I Respond Gastrointestinally to the Idea of Data-Driven Families
Now we see economists like Brown University’s Emily Oster flogging books that recommend parents apply data-driven business practices to their children. If that sentence brought up bile, it’s probably because you don’t think of your family as an economic unit but a family, patiently and fortuitously forged with mutual love and attention. It’s the difference between calculation and care.
It may also be because you are acquainted with Professor Oster’s push during the pre- and post-vaccine pandemic urging parents to make businesslike decisions about COVID risk. Because she is an economist with funding from sources like the Walton Family Foundation and Peter Thiel, it’s hard not to be skeptical about her motives. Who benefits from encouraging people to ignore long-term risks to the community and imagine only their own, short-term risk? In the examples Oster provided in the Slate piece linked above, among the beneficiaries are top dogs in the travel and hospitality industry and employers, whose employees, freed from child care and other household duties, can stay in tip-top working shape.
And this is one of the issues with the 7-Day Happiness Challenge that educator and writer Peter Greene brought to my attention.
Simply stated, the broad assumption underlying the quiz and the challenge is that your reason for being on earth is being happy. On “social fitness,” the Times quotes Dr. Waldinger: “‘‘It’s a choice you make to invest in, week by week, year by year — one that has huge benefits.’” It imagines society as a market. It posits that the purpose of engaging in society is its returns to you in personal happiness.
I Phone a Friend, Hoping to Accumulate Challenge Points
Marshalling my family assets for this edition of the newsletter, I turned to my in-house expert on the language of emotion, my anthropologist sister Catherine Lutz, for her thoughts. She reminded me that happiness is an emotion and emotions are culture-bound. On the Ifaluk atoll in The Federated States of Micronesia where she did her early field work, happiness is not seen as a goal: “No one would say it’s a goal to have these emotions, they would say it’s a goal to have these relationships.”
She went on to explain why happiness would be an unlikely goal in Ifaluk’s less individualistic culture, where there is an understanding that the pursuit of personal happiness can be accompanied by a lack of thought for others.
Can we set meaningful goals for ourselves and for our families and take what a businessperson might call action steps toward them? Of course. My parents just called it “saving for college,” viewed in my middle-class neighborhood as something good parents who could afford it did out of love for their children. Parents who couldn’t afford it were not seen as any less loving. By treating the family — a love unit often viewed as in some way sacred — as a business, Oster and others further “the notion that a good person maximizes their assets — it becomes a moral matter,” as anthropologist Lutz put it.
This brings me back to the specter of failure haunting the 7-Day Happiness Challenge. Not happy? Maybe you just aren’t trying hard enough. No pain, no gain. You didn’t get out of your “comfort zone” toward ever greater extroversion.
It seems worth asking who benefits from pushing us toward more extroversion. Who benefits from more people choosing to attend classes in person instead of online, to work in offices instead of at home, to spend more time with friends pursuing group fun, to un-retire? We all might. But there is a long roster of businesses who do as well.
A genuine desire to socialize more would likely benefit others, especially if it leads us to reach out to those who might be lonely. This is a side effect, though, of the 7-Day Happiness Challenge, not its motivating objective: the Challenge prods us to be nice to others so that we can be happy. If Americans are lonely, it may well result from a larger social order — based on the culture of capitalistic individualism visible in the Challenge — not because they have failed to buck up and phone a friend or talk to a stranger this week. If Americans are unhappy, could it be because we have been told that being happy is our life’s work?
Just before we left the cocoon of our friends’ home this weekend, our hostess led us through a brief ritual (don’t say exercise!) prompting us to think about the coming year. We made wishes for ourselves, our family and friends, and for the wider community. These wishes were not just for happiness but for health, safety, and peace — critical things worth fighting for in the world.
In the end, the language of wishes and hopes puts me more at ease than does the language of challenges and goals. I am a human, not a business. Both humans and businesses can have goals. Only humans have hope.
