The Sociology of
The following interview appeared
Happiness and
in Nucleus, the student newspa-
per of the University of New En-
Contentment:
gland in Armidale, Australia, on
March 12, 2014. The interviewer,
An Interview with
Stu Horsfield, was one of the
newspaper's editors. Dr. Jordan
Dr. Jordan McKenzie
McKenzie is a lecturer in the
Stu Horsfield
School of Behavioural Cognitive
and Social Sciences at the uni-
versity. He holds a Ph.D. from
Flinders University, Australia, and specializes in social and critical theory.
Here, McKenzie discusses his own research within the larger context of
recent work in happiness studies.
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an you say a bit about your work on happiness, and what your definition
Defining happiness I think is really problematic in this area. There are a
lot of different definitions floating around, and if you look at studies
from economics, psychology, sociology and so on, you'll see terms like
"happiness," "subjective wellbeing," "contentment," and "satisfaction";
they not only mean different things within a single study, they can often
mean quite different things from study to study. So, what one group
might refer to as "happiness" may be closer to "wellbeing" for a different
group, and so on.
You might be interested to know that the far majority of happiness
research is actually done by economists, which I think is really peculiar.
There is a journal called The Journal of Happiness Studies which publishes
a lot on this topic. From memory I think about 75-80% of it is written by
economists, and most of the remaining 20% is psychologists. So for soci-
ology, and even philosophy, I think it's interesting to note that especially
in journal publications, their voice is really missing from the area.
My research in the sociology of happiness and contentment is inter-
ested in looking at a number of things: how societies construct or think
about happiness; and how we can think about different forms of happi-
ness depending on whether they are socially derived or perhaps more per-
sonally experienced. In my PhD thesis I was trying to set up the distinc-
tion of happiness as a personal experience and contentment as a social
emotion, or at least a socially dependent emotion. In order to feel content
about something I think you need to feel as though it is in line with your
175
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expectations; that it's in line with social standards, norms and values. So,
something might make you feel really happy, but if it's socially deviant it
might be hard for that to produce a kind of lasting contentment.
As a result that means that contentment is an aspect of your relations
with society, rather than a purely personal, individualistic thing. So in
that sense, you could say that happiness and contentment both change
|
more
ship with society and how you understand yourself through connecting
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You mentioned the problematic nature of happiness, in what sense is it
problematic?
I think one of the reasons happiness is a bit problematic today is really
tied to expectations. If you look at a lot of the data and research on hap-
piness levels, it does appear in a lot of this research that happiness is in
decline. There is this thing that's referred to as the “Easterlin paradox":
which this very famous researcher discovered, which suggests that as dis-
posable income goes up in advanced first world countries, the number of
people reporting that they're very happy actually goes down. This para-
dox has been argued about since the 70s I think, but it does still seem to
be happening.
I think the reason why we're seeing this perceived decline is around
this idea of expectations; we have come to expect a lot. I expect my TV
shows to be instantly available online when I want them to be, I want
the latest bits of information on my phone, instantly and smoothly, I
expect technology to work. We expect to be able to get from one place to
another faster and cheaper. We derive a sense of what we ought to expect
from our social life. Not just through socialisation, education, and so on,
but also through comparing ourselves to our friends, colleagues and fam-
ily members.
We develop these ideas about where we ought to be up to, what we
ought to have accomplished, and these expectations are really tricky,
because we live in a world that is increasingly unpredictable and kind of
chaotic. It's a bit like, you're setting up these life goals, but by the time
you're ready to accomplish them the goal posts have moved.
You might be doing a university degree, and then at the end of the 10
three or four years it takes you to finish the degree, maybe that career
doesn't really exist in the way it existed when you started the degree.
This is something that we all feel strangely familiar about, but at the
same time we all expect to have these great careers and to accomplish a
great deal. That can be really challenging emotionally, to live with that
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Easterlin paradox: named for its author, economist Richard Easterlin (b. 1926).
HORSFIELD The Sociology of Happiness and Contentment 177
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kind of instability and impermanence, but at the same time have these
high expectations for the possibilities of what might happen.
It sounds kind of depressing, but at the same time the reason I'm so
interested in this area is that I think there are a lot of really valuable les-
stand happiness.
sons that can be extracted out of sociology that can help us better under-
Does happiness emerge from contentment? Or are they different things?
I think they're quite different. One of the funny things about happiness
when you look at it in the long term is that often the times in our lives that
we look back on as being the happiest were not actually terribly enjoyable
while we were doing them. There's a great line from Theodor Adornoº
in Minima Moralia where he says
that happiness only really exists
in memories, because when we are "Happiness only really exists in
doing things that make us happy, memories, because when we are
it's often not really pleasurable.
doing things that make us happy,
As an undergraduate student,
you might think back to a time
it's often not really pleasurable.
when you were writing an essay
and it was just painful, it was really tough and you doubted yourself,
stressed, worried, and panicked. And then you get a really high grade for
it and you look back on this 10 years later as being this great time in your
life where you accomplished something fantastic, but at the time you just
wanted to crawl back into bed and hide from everything. And that's of
course perfectly normal. That highlights one of the challenges with our
thinking about happiness.
I think modernity promises happiness to be this kind of instant gratifi- 15
cation, we live in this kind of instant consumer society, and so I think
there are aspects of modernity that make promises about happiness that it
actually can't keep. You know, "if you do this or that you'll be happy," if
you get this new car or new outfit and so on. And that teaches us that hap-
piness is something that should be gained instantly, that you should get
something for nothing, or get more than you put in. I don't think happi-
ness really works that way. That leads back to the point I was making be-
fore about expectations, that we expect things to be instantly satisfying.
Would you say that happiness, and to an extent contentment, involves an ele-
ment of hard work?
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Theodor Adorno (1903-1969): German philosopher and sociologist, and a key figure
in the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
178 What Makes People Happy?
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Yeah, unfortunately. This is an argument that has been going on for a
long time. Do we need a degree of unpleasantness in order to help us
contextualise pleasantness? I definitely think we need a variety.
Part of that is accepting that a certain degree of unpleasantness or sad-
ness is actually perfectly natural. I think we live in a society that doesn't
think that way. A few hundred years ago we would think about melancho-
lia as being something that highly intelligent people had. The great com-
poser or the great mathematician would go through a period of melancho-
lia and it was admirable. It was like an athlete punishing their body in
order to accomplish a physical task. An intellectual would go through mel-
ancholia to accomplish some great piece of work. This is something that
people really were in awe of, and now it's something that has to be cured.
Of course, I have to be absolutely clear: my work is more about hap-
piness and sadness in the majority of people. In terms of cases where
people are suffering from something quite radically different I'll hold
back from commenting because it's not my area. I'm not looking at
people who are suffering from an illness, I'm looking at people who fit
within what we might call “normal," but who, in day to day life will feel
happy and feel sad. I think there is definitely a wider scope for thinking
about normal amounts of happiness and sadness than we sometimes
give credit for. But the idea that sadness necessarily has to be fixed and
cured, I don't buy into that idea.
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Understanding the Text
1. Why is it so hard to define happiness, according to McKenzie?
2. What is the attitude of Horsfield, the interviewer? How would you describe
the tone of the interview?
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Reflection and Response
3. Reflect on the relationships between personal and social definitions of hap-
piness. How do these two realms interact, according to McKenzie? Is this
true in your experience?
4. McKenzie speaks about the experience of a university student. Does his
assessment of the life of the university student align with your experience?
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Making Connections
5. Write an essay in which you consider McKenzie's comments from the van-
tage point of Gretchen Rubin ("July: Buy Some Happiness," p. 291). Does
Rubin share McKenzie's point of view on happiness?
6. McKenzie discusses hard work and instant gratification as polar opposites
in our culture. Find examples of people working for happiness and write an
essay about their work, citing McKenzie as you make your case.
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