Book Review: America the Anxious

wordsofastory hooked me up with Netgalley, which is a place where book reviewers (even book reviewers on a quite modest scale like myself) can get galleys of upcoming books for freeeeeeeeeeee, so of course I spent a large proportion of yesterday evening going through it looking for books that I wanted to read.

The first one I actually settled down and did read was Ruth Whippman's America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, which turned out to be a good place to start. It's a good, breezy introduction to the American cult of happiness, with just enough memoir to keep it moving but not so much that the memoir ever overpowered Whippman's research, the main gist of which seems to be that there is something creepy and victim-blamy about the more rah-rah power of positive thinking "If you're not happy it's because you're not trying hard enough!" side of the American search for happiness.

If there's one thing we do know about happiness - and there may in fact only be one thing; as Whippman notes, we don't seem to understand happiness very well - it's that "our happiness depends on other people" (italicized in the original), which is a bit of a bummer if you want to pull yourself up by your happiness bootstraps but kind of a relief if the bootstraps snapped sometime last November. We don't have to do this on our own! In fact we can't do it on our own! Hooray!

And in fact, as Whippman points out, making happiness our preeminent goal in life will probably backfire anyway, because it's "so elusive and hard to define, it's impossible to pinpoint when it's even been reached, a recipe for anxiety." Hence one of the reasons for the sky-rocketing levels of anxiety and depression in America.

(The book did make me wonder a bit if our whole approach to treating anxiety as a public health issue is wrong, because we treat it as an individual problem that requires an individual solution rather than an individual problem indicating a larger societal problem that needs fixing. As if, basically, we were treating cholera as if it were the result of individual intestinal issues, rather than seeing it as indicative of a contaminated water supply somewhere.

However, fixing catastrophically low levels of social connectedness is a bit more difficult than plugging a contaminated water pump, and I certainly wouldn't know where to start on a societal level.)

But getting back to the book. Whippman also spends a chapter with the Mormons! I love Mormons. Actually I love reading about intense religious groups in general: Hasidic Jews, evangelical Christians, snake-handling Baptists, the Amish, anyone.

Whipmann notes that the Mormons are both the happiest people in America and the most depressed, which she puzzles over at first before realizing it actually makes sense provided you realize that you're talking about two different subgroups of Mormons here: the church has fairly rigid guidelines for how to be a good man or a good woman (and they are rigidly gendered guidelines too), so people who fit fairly naturally within those guidelines will feel especially happy - not only are they living a life they enjoy that their community approves, but they also won't be tormented by the question "is this my BEST life?" that bedevils secular folk, because the church says that yes, yes it is - while people who don't fit are going to feel guilty and terrible and depressed.

A quick, interesting read. It probably won't blow your mind (unless you're big on the Power of Positive Thinking, I guess), but I quite enjoyed it.