Ruth Whippman: “Happiness is Other People”

Whippman is the author of America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, and this short opinion piece for the New York Times offers a sampling of her insights into the psychological health of the U.S. In a nutshell, her thesis here is that Americans have given themselves over to a cultish pursuit of self-care and self-actualization in an effort to become happier, and that doing so has come at the expense of what everyone knows is the real source of happiness: good relationships. “Study after study shows that good social relationships are the strongest, most consistent predictor there is of a happy life, even going so far as to call them a ‘necessary condition for happiness,’ meaning that humans can’t actually be happy without them,” Whippman reports. Indeed, this seems like such well-established concept that if I were making a list of necessary or important conditions for happiness – and I suppose in a way I am – I would feel perfectly confident in putting this one at the top. But what I am less confident about – or at least more curious about – is Whippman’s argument that there is a direct correlation between Americans’ pursuit of their best selves and the apparent dearth of meaningful social interaction.

Among the information that Whippman provides is a Bureau of Labor Statistics time use survey, which found that the amount of time the average American devotes to “any kind of socializing and communicating at all,” outside of work hours, is about half an hour a day. Time spent watching TV came in at three hours a day; we even spend more time grooming ourselves (just under an hour) than we do interacting with others. Coincident with this grim social landscape is a “marked increase in solitary ‘happiness pursuits,’” which Whippman describes as “activities carried out either completely alone or in a group without interaction – with the explicit aim of keeping each person locked in her own private emotional experience.”

The “marked increase” she’s referring to is the finding, from a survey conducted by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in 2015, that the number of people practicing yoga in the U.S. had risen to 21 million, nearly doubling from 2002. It is not so easy for me, as it apparently is for Whippman, to draw a meaningful correlation between these two sets of information. I can get on board the idea that the cult of the individual will ultimately (and not surprisingly) lead to personal isolation, but I can’t help but think she’s misidentifying the techniques we Americans use to alienate ourselves from one another. Are yoga classes really what’s keeping us apart, and making us miserable?