The Happiness Fantasy Book Summary - The Happiness Fantasy Book explained in key points

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The Happiness Fantasy summary

Name: The Happiness Fantasy
Rating: 3.8 (50 reviews)
Author: Carl Cederström

Carl Cederström

A history of happiness

3.8 (50 ratings)

34 mins

Topics

Happiness

Table of Contents

The Happiness Fantasy
Summary of 11 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Discover the strange origins of our current ideas about happiness.

How do you achieve happiness? It’s one of our most fundamental questions – something that human beings have been wrestling with for thousands of years. Along the way, we’ve produced innumerable answers, from the philosophical texts, religious creeds and spiritual practices of the ancient world to the psychological therapies, pharmaceutical products and self-help books of today.

These blinks will not provide you with the answer – or even an answer – to this age-old question. Instead, they will deconstruct one of the most prevalent and pernicious answers that have taken root in the collective imagination of modern Western culture: the happiness fantasy.

In these blinks, you’ll learn about the dubious history, premises and ramifications of this happiness fantasy that consists of a set of questionable ideas and ideals and creates a distorted vision of the good life – an aspirational notion of a life that’s “good” in both senses of the term: desirable and moral.

Along the way, you’ll find out about

an influential psychological theory that placed orgasms at the pinnacle of human existence;
a supposedly miraculous device that could cure all diseases; and
a motivational speech that began with the entire audience being called a bunch of “assholes.”

The happiness fantasy provides people with a template for living the good life.

When you create a new document in a word processor, you start with two basic options: a blank page or a template. If you choose the latter, you’re furnished with a prefabricated design for the newsletter, brochure or whatever you want to make. The general layout is already established; you just have to fill in the outlines with your particular content.

Similarly, the happiness fantasy provides you with a template for living the good life. Thanks to this template, you don’t have to come up with your own blueprint for constructing an enjoyable, meaningful human existence. It’s already been supplied by the culture in which you’ve been raised, and all you have to do is follow it.

The central component of the template is the concept of self-actualization. The idea here is that you have a true inner potential – a set of capabilities for thinking, feeling, desiring and doing things. These capabilities constitute your true inner self – a sort of intangible core at the center of your personhood.

Around this core, you accumulate a variety of extraneous elements in the course of living your life: misguided beliefs, unhealthy emotions, self-limiting inhibitions and destructive patterns of behavior. As they crust over you like a shell, these elements obscure and obstruct your inner potential, leaving you with just the scab-like shell to present to the outside world. This is your inauthentic self.

By shedding the shell of this inauthentic external self, reconnecting with your true inner self and releasing the concealed capabilities lying dormant within it, you thereby actualize yourself. In other words, you turn the potentiality of your true inner self into an external reality.

In doing so, you also become authentic, since your outward self is now an accurate reflection, expression and manifestation of your inward self. And, as your no-longer-obstructed self comes pouring out into the world, you also experience pleasure, which is the positive sensation you feel when you exercise and gratify your inner self’s capabilities and desires.

So there you have it: actualize your true inner potential, authentically express your true inner self and seek the pleasures that come with doing so. That’s the happiness fantasy’s template for the good life.

The ideas behind the happiness fantasy have a strange origin story, which begins with Wilhelm Reich.

The ideas behind the happiness fantasy came into prominence during the 1960s and 1970s in California, where they became associated with the era’s countercultural movements. However, their roots can be traced back even further – to 1920s Vienna, where they germinated from the rather unusual life, work and thought of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich.

Starting from a very early age, Reich claims to have been driven by an obsession with sexuality, which was sparked by a series of sexual encounters in his childhood. These included masturbating his younger brother’s nursemaid at the age of five, which Reich himself later retold as him reaching “feverishly for her genitals”. At the age of ten, he eavesdropped on his mother having extramarital sex with his private teacher, and at age eleven, lost his virginity to the family’s chef.

The anti-authoritarian aspects of Wilhelm Reich’s ideas resonated with mid-century Californian hipsters.

A scattering of seeds does not grow into a forest overnight. They take years to develop and spread. The same is true of influential ideas and the movements into which they eventually blossom.

Such was the case for Reich, whose ideas first took root in California in the late 1940s and 1950s. There, groups of young, left-wing and anarchistic bohemians who became known as “hipsters” were beginning to gather. A number of signifiers marked them out from the masses of conventional society: beards, sandals, corduroys, makeshift furniture, abstract art and words like “affective,” “fluid” and “orgastic.”

In Big Sur, California, ideas about uninhibited sexuality were fused with drug-fueled mysticism.

To follow the path of Reich’s ideas from the hipsters of the 1950s to the hippies of the 1960s, we first need to make a stop at writer Henry Miller’s residence in scenic Big Sur, California.

As the infamous author of sexually explicit novels that were banned in the United States, Miller became a countercultural icon in the 1950s. When he settled in Big Sur in 1957, his friends followed his lead, and soon the area was known as “West Greenwich Village” – the Californian version of New York’s famous epicenter of bohemian life.

The ideas of the happiness fantasy were further developed at the Esalen Institute by the psychoanalyst Fritz Perls.

Before he took up a five-year residency at the Esalen Institute in 1964, Fritz Perls dressed the part of a traditional psychiatrist, wearing collared shirts and sports coats. Once he arrived in Big Sur, however, he ditched them for vibrant jumpsuits and a Santa Claus-like beard.

However, despite his radical change in appearance, his work at the institute represented a continuation of Gestalt therapy – a Wilhelm Reich-inspired approach to psychotherapy that Perls developed back in his more buttoned-down days.

Werner Erhard fused the ideas of the human potential movement with an emphasis on material success.

The story of Werner Erhard begins with the story of John Paul Rosenberg.

In 1959, at the age of 24, Rosenberg abandoned his wife and four children in Philadelphia. He then changed his name to Werner Erhard and fled to San Francisco, where he became a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

In his challenging training courses, Werner Erhard preached a message of an all-powerful self.

Given Erhard’s influences from the human potential movement, you might expect his est training seminars to have been hippy-dippy affairs, full of peace and love. But the truth was quite the opposite.

To begin with, the seminars were physically demanding. Each seminar consisted of four sessions, and each session lasted 15 to 19 hours and participants weren’t allowed to eat or get up from their chairs, even if they had to urinate. The only permitted exceptions were a few short bathroom breaks and a single meal break.

Erhard’s messages live on today, and their logic can lead to victim-blaming.

If success is just a matter of effort, and anyone can accomplish anything if he tries hard enough, what does it mean if someone fails? Well, by the same logic, it means he didn’t try hard enough. And that means he has no one but himself to blame for his failure. After all, thanks to his all-powerful will, he is responsible for everything that happens to him, both good and bad.

From this logic, Werner Erhard drew the most extreme conclusions possible. Not only were business people responsible for their career failures, but victims of rape, murder, cancer, war and even the Holocaust were to blame for their suffering, he claimed.

By the 1980s, the human potential movement’s radical politics were replaced with a more corporate-friendly mentality.

When Werner Erhard’s self-development training organization changed its name from the slightly hippyish-sounding est to the more professional Forum in 1984 and then Landmark Worldwide in 1991, the transformation wasn’t just cosmetic. It reflected a deeper metamorphosis not just in Erhard’s organization, but in the human potential movement as a whole, of which est had become the vanguard. In a word, it was becoming commercialized.

In the 1970s, the movement had already spread from a relatively small group of West Coast bohemians to an increasingly mass-scale, mainstream middle-class American audience. In doing so, it underwent a sort of Fritz Perls-style makeover in reverse – ditching its “out there,” bushy-bearded stylings for a more buttoned-down demeanor.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the ideas of the human potential movement were integrated into corporate culture.

Beginning in the 1970s, American corporations faced a problem. Employees’ average working hours were increasing while their wages remained stagnant. That was great for the corporations’ bottom lines, but it made their workers unhappy.

On top of that, the younger members of the workforce had come of age during the heyday of the American countercultural movements. They’d been steeped in the era’s unconventional ideas, many of which derived from the human potential movement and the radical political activists of the time.

The fusion of the happiness fantasy with corporate culture is deeply problematic and increasingly untenable.

One of the nice things about studying corporations is that you often don’t have to do any guesswork to figure out their objectives. In many cases, they openly reveal themselves in their official communications.

Such is the case with Zappos, which explains the rationale behind its amusement-filled workplace right on its website. Immediately after touting its embrace of individuality and fun, it explicitly states its objective: rather than promoting “work/life balance in the traditional sense,” the company seeks to cultivate “work/life integration.”

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What is The Happiness Fantasy about?

The Happiness Fantasy (2018) advances a provocative thesis, encapsulated in its title: our contemporary ideas about happiness amount to a fantasy that’s increasingly out of sync with reality and unable to deliver what it promises. By taking a whirlwind tour of the history of this fantasy, we can begin to see through its illusions.

Who should read The Happiness Fantasy?

People who are interested in the countercultural movements and philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s
People who are skeptical of self-help books and seminars
People who are burned out by the invasion of work life into leisure time

About the Author

Carl Cederström is an associate professor of organization studies at the Stockholm Business School of Stockholm University. He is the coauthor of Dead Man Working (2013), The Wellness Syndrome (2015) and Desperately Seeking Self-Improvement: A Year Inside the Optimization Movement (2018). He has also written articles for a variety of publications including the Guardian, the Washington Post, New Scientist and Harvard Business Review.

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