Application Question: (absurdity of happiness articles)

Foley observes that the pursuit of happiness can lead to unhappiness while Cohen sees a silver lining in our attempts to measure happiness.

How much emphasis does your society place on the pursuit of happiness? Do you think this is beneficial?

My society places an undue amount of emphasis on pursuing happiness instead of simply enjoying it in the here and now. The main reason is that like in Foley’s society, we too are sipping a ‘deadly cocktail’ comprising dissatisfaction, a sense that we do not deserve to enjoy happiness without working for it, and constantly comparing ourselves against those we believe are happier than us.

The situation is as ‘problematic’ for us as it is in Foley’s society. There is confusion here that the pursuit of money is equivalent to the pursuit of happiness. We are trained from young that our happiness is far away, out of reach, and that to approach that eventual goal we must work to earn enough to afford the finer, more luxurious things in life and then we will be happy. Hence we look on others in our society who are wealthier than us as having ‘made it’, though we frown on some of them whom we feel did not work hard enough and yet have more privileges than us. This is particularly true of our Ministers who are paid awesome salaries compared to our meagre monthly wages, and yet we feel that they are incompetent at their jobs, which is to make it easier for us to achieve happiness.

It is hard to ‘question… the system’ (Foley) because we are too deeply immersed in it to view it objectively. We emphasize pursuing happiness because the pursuit is our primary motivation for working hard in order to survive as individuals as well as a society. Without presenting ourselves as a diligent, capable, tireless workforce, we have little else to offer the rest of the world. With people as our only natural resource, the entire nation’s survival depends on us not resting on our laurels but to continuously strive to achieve, to offer more, to do better than before, even past retirement age. The myth, of course, is that there is happiness for each of us at the end, but not now. Now we just have to knuckle down and work to pursue that end.

In the meantime, though we do not actually have a habit of taking drugs to keep us from actual depression, we have our own addictions to make us feel happier. The Singaporean’s cocktail of choice is food, shopping and Hollywood. Unfortunately, similar to Foley’s antidepressants, they only provide a temporary relief from our stress and anxiety, and the next day we are busy pursuing happiness again.

This constant state of civic unhappiness cannot be good for our society in the long run. With our government making policies that focus on economic growth so much, we the people have grown cynical about its intentions. It’s a trickle-down effect: the government emphasizes economic growth and we have to keep working to grow larger and larger slices of the economic pie, yet we feel we are not benefiting from our hard work. While our salaries stagnate, the fruit of our labour are being shared by an increasing flood of foreign nationals and by our government representatives with their exorbitant payscales. This in effect multiplies our discontent, as much as the British public scorns their own Prime Minister’s policies (Cohen).

While our government today – since the watershed elections of 2011 in which the people voiced it’s anger by electing an unprecedented 6 opposition candidates into parliament – is paying more attention to policies that focus on social happiness such as emphasizing values education over pragmatic exam-score based education, healthcare and family-friendly, work-life balance policies, it may already be too late. Linking happiness to policy (Cohen) is an uncertain proposition. Our earlier policies linking economic growth to happiness have created our current stewpot of brooding malcontent; while current policies specifically targeting happiness are being viewed cynically as just lip-service. As long as we continue to chase after happiness rather than learn to appreciate what we have our society will continue to destabilize.