Opinion | The Endless Quest to Max Out on Happiness - The New York Times

OpinionJessica Grose

Ms. Grose is a Times Opinion writer and the author of a Times newsletter on culture, social change and the American family.

Three times a day my phone pings with a notification telling me that I have a new happiness survey to take. The survey, from TrackYourHappiness.org, asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being and how happy I felt about it all. I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from “bad” to “good.” Though the trackers’ authors offer a disclaimer that “correlation does not prove causation,” results from thousands of its users published in 2010 suggest that people are happier when they are focused.

After I took 100 surveys over about a month, that’s not what my results told me. I reported the most happiness when I was eating and the least when I was working. I was happier at home than I was outside or anywhere else.

My biggest takeaway, though, is that much of my life consists of things that I don’t particularly want to do, like folding laundry and struggling with the wording of a paragraph. Being reminded that most of my life is obligatory does not exactly spark joy.

As the weeks of survey taking went by, I had another, more paralyzing thought: that this focus on my feelings was instilling a new kind of anxiety. Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary rocks, I was thinking about the survey’s infernal happiness toggle and where this experience ranked relative to the other moments I had tracked.

The survey is just one example from an increasingly crowded field of tools offering consumers the chance not just to contemplate their happiness but also to measure it, track it, schedule it and optimize it. Every app store is overflowing with offerings like the Happiness Planner, Happiness 360°, Daylio and more. Apple’s Health app has a mood tracker (with one of those damn toggles) built into all of its devices, and even my Fitbit offers mood tracking, with some fancy bonus features if I pay to upgrade to premium status.

According to Stephen Schueller, a psychologist who runs the technology and mental health lab at the University of California, Irvine, there are now thousands of these apps — so many that he used to run an entire site that reviewed their credibility, user experience and transparency. How-to books about boosting your happiness in measurable ways are mainstays on the best-seller list. And there is no end to online courses and expensive products that make similar promises.

The deep attraction to these ideas and products ties together the decline in Americans’ mental health, which leaves many people desperate to find relief, and the mania for the optimized self, which in its most extreme form drives tech barons to spend small fortunes measuring every second of output from all 78 of their organs to maximize every bio function until they die.

But feelings aren’t the same as other kinds of health metrics, like steps and heart rate and liver function. There is a great deal of disagreement on how even to measure happiness and fairly weak evidence that doing so makes us significantly happier. Less considered is the question: Could tracking happiness make us feel worse?

According to one study published early in the tracking fad, frequent “texting about happiness seemed to be particularly distressing among those with more negative emotional tendencies (depression and neuroticism)” and “may have drawn attention to their typically unpleasant emotional state, thus bearing the potential of perpetuating a downward spiral of satisfaction.”

More recent studies suggest that for some, overvaluing happiness can lead to excessive rumination. My colleague Ellen Barry recently covered a study that showed mindfulness training did not improve student mental health and, in fact, “students at highest risk for mental health problems did somewhat worse after receiving the training.”

Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who helped establish happiness as a subject of legitimate academic inquiry, says some of the field’s findings have been misapplied. “I think it’s a pretty serious mistake to think that what life is about is your moment-to-moment mood,” he told me. “I think that’s a recipe for depression and anxiety.”

After Dr. Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, there was an explosion of academic interest in happiness and a corresponding proliferation of happiness-related commerce. But in the 1990s and 2000s, happiness media had more of an “Eat, Pray, Love” flavor: Happiness was meant to be discovered in meditation and pleasure and by abandoning the rat race. By the 2020s, the happiness gurus sound more like McKinsey consultants, connecting happiness with productivity and focus, using the stilted language and metrics of workplace wellness initiatives (which have almost zero real benefits for employees). It has all been self-involved, for sure — but now it’s joyless, too.

If there’s little backing for the notion that these interventions help and a real chance that they hurt, why are Americans so eager to spend our days obsessing over our feelings?

A Revolution in Human Expectations

For much of Western history, the idea of — and even the word for — happiness was inextricably linked to chance. The ancient Greek philosopher Solon believed that the concept was so unpredictable, it made sense only in the long view of a complete life.

In the West, a new idea emerged in the 18th century: that happiness was “something that human beings are supposed to have,” as Darrin M. McMahon, the chair of the history department at Dartmouth, told me. “God created us in order to be happy. And if we’re not happy, then there’s something wrong with the world or wrong with the way we think about it.” Mr. McMahon, the author of “Happiness: A History,” said this is how we get the idea that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are inalienable rights endowed by man’s creator.

In earlier centuries, Christians were expected to be solemn, pious and focused on getting to the afterlife; then they were taught “that being cheerful was pleasing to God,” as Peter Stearns, a distinguished professor of history at George Mason University, wrote in an article for Harvard Business Review in 2012. And so, whereas in earlier eras some might have experienced guilt over being too happy in this fallen world, it became possible for people to feel something entirely new: guilt for not being happy enough.

In the 20th century, the imposition to be measurably, demonstrably happy became intertwined with the modern workplace — specifically the interest in employee productivity. This imperative reached new prominence in 1952 with a best-selling book by the Protestant minister Norman Vincent Peale, “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

Mr. Peale exhorted readers: “Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as failing; never doubt the reality of the mental image.”

The social critic Barbara Ehrenreich noted that Mr. Peale’s book was marketed to executives as a productivity booster for their staff members. “Give this book to employees. It pays dividends!” blared an advertisement she cited. Happiness became not just an emotional imperative but a financial one, as well.

How to achieve it became a matter of increasingly intense study at the end of the 20th century. At the American Psychological Association, Dr. Seligman argued that his profession hadn’t done enough empirical research on “what actions lead to well‐being, to positive individuals, to flourishing communities and to a just society.”

The Allure of Magic Numbers

The study of happiness grew into a mainstream commercial powerhouse, generating millions of book sales, inspiring media impressions from TikTok life coaches and TED Talks and forming the intellectual basis of all of today’s tracking apps. But the focus in the marketplace was not on creating flourishing communities and a just society but rather on how individuals can measure and boost their own happiness, as in the huge franchise that promises to make people “10 percent happier.”

Suggestions that were once challenging have been so thoroughly mainstreamed that they now just sound banal — but that doesn’t mean they have proved effective. A pair of systematic reviews by Elizabeth Dunn and Dunigan Folk, researchers at the University of British Columbia, found that there is “surprisingly little support for many widely recommended strategies,” including meditation, exercise and being in nature.

In “Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America,” Daniel Horowitz wrote, “Despite or perhaps because of its popularity, virtually every finding of positive psychology under consideration remains contested, by both insiders and outsiders.”

Mr. Horowitz, a professor emeritus at Smith College, continued: “Controversies go well beyond the question of replication or reproducibility. Major conclusions have been challenged, modified or even abandoned.” The application of precise numbers in positive psychology has been particularly thorny — he called them “glib formulas.”

In one well-publicized episode, the professors Barbara L. Fredrickson and Marcial F. Losada announced that extensive research had revealed to them a “critical positivity ratio.” This wasn’t a metaphor; it was a precise numerical value, derived through complex mathematical functions, to describe the ideal relationship between positive and negative emotions. If you run your own emotions through the algorithm, the number you’re looking for is equal to or greater than 2.9013, the threshold Drs. Fredrickson and Losada said, between “flourishing” and “languishing.”

The idea had proved highly influential in academia and was featured in a best-selling book. But to Nick Brown, a former I.T. professional who encountered the ratio during a course in applied positive psychology, the idea that you could reduce all human emotion to a simple number seemed ludicrous. And when he looked at the mathematical calculations, he found they were just wrong. He and the professors Alan D. Sokal and Harris L. Friedman published a thorough takedown in 2013. In a follow-up article five years later, Drs. Brown and Friedman wrote:

A moment’s thought will show how impossible it is to actually measure a person’s experience of positive emotions on this basis. If someone laughs at a joke on TV, eats an ice cream, sees their dog get run over and watches a nice sunset, are they at a three to one ratio of positive to negative emotions and flourishing? And so it is with any comparison of emotions, as who can provide a value-free metric on which to draw any comparison in a universal-invariant way?

It wasn’t enough. People continued to credulously cite the ratio. And the questionable idea that we can achieve some standardized, actionable accounting of our fleeting emotions is now baked into every app that asks us to record our feelings on some arbitrary scale.

Paying Close Attention

For all my skepticism, I can’t deny that these apps, these books, this whole measuring and maximizing approach to happiness has a powerful appeal for many people. I wanted to better understand why. So I called Kevin Sandler.

Mr. Sandler, who graduated from college in 2022, works remotely and has a home base in Long Beach, N.Y. He has spent the past few years traveling frequently, including one year spent living in a van and visiting all 50 states. (He flew to Alaska and Hawaii.) He has a sweet and enthusiastic manner and a clear desire to get the most out of his young life: to see everything, to do everything.

Since 2018, Mr. Sandler has tracked his mood for every 15-minute interval that he was awake. In a YouTube video that he posted about this practice, he is charmingly self-aware about how unusual his project is. When people ask him why he started tracking his moods, he tells them, “I want to say it was some big life moment or discovery that made me say, ‘I’m going to start tracking my happiness,’ but the short answer is that I’m crazy.”

When he started, in his senior year of high school, he checked his mood three times a day. He quickly realized that wasn’t enough data to capture the fluctuations. A few months in, he figured out that 15-minute intervals gave him the most accurate picture of his emotional life.

Mr. Sandler has an idiosyncratic method: He tracks his location using Google Maps and then the following day creates a kind of emotional map. He has trained himself, he says, to remember exactly how he felt when he was, say, out to dinner with his friends. That’s a different approach from most of the trackers on the market, which seek to record emotions in real time. “I’d argue that when you’re in the moment, you don’t have a full perception of how you actually feel,” he told me.

Over time he has modified the data he collects — he now tracks his food intake, as well — and recognizes patterns. For example, he noticed that dairy makes him tired and grumpy. But Mr. Sandler said that this kind of granular information isn’t useful to anyone else and that few people would want to put in the time — over an hour a day, for much of it, though using Google Forms has helped him streamline the process somewhat.

He is very well versed in the happiness literature, and he’s somewhat critical of it. He has even added to it with a paper on his self-tracking, in which he engages with previous theorizing from Dr. Seligman and expands on it. Mr. Sandler’s main takeaway: The factor with the biggest influence on his emotional well-being is being around other people.

The Trap of Emotional Optimization

Mr. Sandler is in good company. For all the supposed happiness-boosting strategies that aren’t supported by evidence, one of the few things that might move the needle is social contact. Dealing with other humans forces us to put up with their frailties and chaos and churlishness and to expose our own.

Engaging with other people as our imperfect selves shatters the illusion of control that we have when we’re attempting to optimize our moment-to-moment feelings. It also goes against the self-help cliché that we cannot have good relationships unless we work on ourselves first. But there is no committee that will tell you that you’re appropriately actualized, giving you a stamp of well-adjusted approval or an ideal positive feelings ratio to allow you into the general population to fraternize. You just have to do it.

The youngest adults, who have been marinating in a positive psychology culture since they left the womb, may be the most deeply affected by the inward shift of the search for happiness. A recent survey from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education makes the case that we are, as a culture, overfocusing on the “psychological talk and a self-help culture” that has “caused many people to look inward to find meaning and vitality. Yet the self by itself is a poor source for meaning.”

Mr. Sandler told me people ask him all the time whether they should track their emotions and whether it will make them happier. He said he tells them to focus instead on contentment, “the feeling of being satisfied with your life overall.”

The frenzied, overstuffed marketplace of happiness optimization will never be able to fix the fundamentals of the human condition or bring a lasting kind of purpose to a new generation. There will never be easy or straightforward answers to our most profound questions of existence, and ranking emotions feels like a diminution of their awesome power. I do not want to spend those daily walks home with my daughter wondering how they stack up against a morning run or dinner with a friend or any other moment in my day that might make me feel something. The user experience of being alive cannot be graphed.

“The biggest thing that I learned throughout all of my happiness range tracking,” Mr. Sandler said, “is that happiness isn’t the end-all goal that I was looking for.”

Jessica Grose is a Times Opinion writer and the author of a Times newsletter on culture, social change and the American family.

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