Why Are Americans So Anxious?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/books/review/america-the-anxious-ruth-whippman.html

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AMERICA THE ANXIOUSHow Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous WrecksBy Ruth Whippman247 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $25.99.

The first day I arrived in Paris for my semester abroad I smiled at all the helpful strangers: the passport agent, the taxi driver, the random person I asked for directions. No one smiled back but I must have been too excited to notice. Then I smiled at the guy at the cash register who sold me some bubble gum and he muttered something. It took a minute to absorb his words, although he was speaking in mocking, accented English: “Stupid American.”

I had largely forgotten that slap in the face until I read Ruth Whippman’s new book, “America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks.” For us natives, reading this book can be an unnerving experience. Whippman, who is a transplanted British writer, moved to California when her husband got a job here. She spent much of her time settling in her family, but all the while she was watching us — how we read, eat, work, medicate, exercise and pray. And what she noticed the most was how the same subject comes up all the time: happiness.

The gynecologist — mid-exam — chats with her about Gretchen Rubin’s best seller, “Happier at Home.” Her new friend Allison is so busy self-actualizing that she has no time to hang out. At the playground, the mantra of mellow parenting is “I don’t care, as long as he’s happy.” Whippman notices after a while that her reflexively sardonic British brain is suddenly looping around a new set of questions: Am I happy? Right at this moment? What about now? And now? Am I happy enough? As happy as everyone else? What about Meghan? Is she happier than me?

Tuning into this alien internal monologue reveals her grand thesis about America: The problem with our quest for happiness is that, apparently, it’s making us miserable. After some idle Googling, her suspicions are confirmed. Various clever studies by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, show that “paradoxically, the more people valued and were encouraged to value happiness as a separate life goal, the less happy they were.” When it comes to emotional temperament, America is the clumsy suitor of nations. We yearn and obsess and plot new elaborate strategies as the object of our desire shrinks ever farther away. It’s a little embarrassing.

Whippman’s book is not a scathing social critique. For that we have Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 “Bright-Sided,” a rigorous dissection of American “positive thinking.” Instead it’s more like a travelogue narrated by a curious, funny and highly motivated guide. Once she’s acquired her filter, Whippman ventures out and applies it to various corners of American life: the business world, parenting culture, religious communities, social media. Each discrete adventure doesn’t really turn up anything new or profound — it’s not the first time, for example, I’ve read that your cheery vacation pictures on Facebook are making the rest of us anxious. But put together, the snapshots add up to an uncomfortable picture of American life.

My favorite chapter is Whippman’s visit to Zappos, the online shoe and clothing shop run by the “high-profile happiness evangelist” Tony Hsieh. For Whippman’s purposes Zappos is the perfect microcosm of the American paradox: a place stocked with life coaches and colorful balloons and ever inventive examples of “corporate fungineering.” Whippman has a weird email exchange with Hsieh in which he uses lots of exclamation points and refers to the “holacracy” and “brand aura” (she doesn’t know and neither do I). But he declines to meet with her because he doesn’t prioritize people he feels “drained by after I interact with them,” he writes.

Instead, Whippman visits the Downtown Project, the 60 acres near Las Vegas that Hsieh aimed to turn into “one big party” with no distinctions between “working and playing.” I knew where this chapter was going because it’s been well covered, but I was satisfied to follow Whippman as she discovered it for herself. As she soon learns, in 2013 a few of the tech entrepreneurs who had moved there, subjected themselves to endless happiness reviews and set happiness goals every day, died by suicide. One of them, Ovik Banerjee, a 24-year-old administrator for Hsieh’s project, was known for starting his daily blog posts with inspirational sayings: “If you aren’t scared, you’re doing it wrong.”

Whippman could have marinated a few more years in American culture before passing judgment. She seems to have trouble, for example, distinguishing between what’s fringe and what’s mainstream. An early chapter on the self-help industry uses Landmark Education as its central example, although Landmark has complicated roots and isn’t as ubiquitous as other such operations. Her chapter on a Mormon community employs the typical European approach of treating religious Americans as exotic zoo animals (although I was surprised to learn that Mormon Utah has the country’s highest rate of antidepressant use).

In the end, Whippman’s own cheery nature gets in the way of a decisive critique. Yes, she successfully dismantles some of the popular happiness studies. And she convinces us that the American emphasis on personal happiness takes the pressure off, say, the social welfare system to actually help people better their lives. But emotionally she seems pretty delighted to be living in America, with all the upbeat moms and spirited toddlers and oversharing small talk. Or at the very least she doesn’t seem eager to get back to the U.K., where the moms compete over who is most bitter.

As a result the book reads like a first draft of anthropology, early field notes on the American emotional landscape. The observations are somewhat dashed off but useful in their honesty and immediacy. It’s always good to hear what outsiders have to say. If I had written a book after my year in France, it would have read much like Whippman’s but in reverse: Frenchmen are not all that friendly with people they don’t know. In fact, they seem boringly contented, seeing the same friends they saw in childhood, eating the same food, wearing the same collared shirts tucked in the same way. They are not constantly striving for happiness because they are not constantly striving for much of anything, beyond what they already know. There’d be some truth in what I wrote, but not a deep truth. A Frenchman would read it, bristle, and dismiss me as a stupid American.