Perhaps the happiness studies crowd should not be blamed for their blind spots about God, because their concern is so exclusively with the present world. Or perhaps they should be blamed, since they study this world so carefully, and yet they fail to see even this world clearly. 

Demand elicits supply. The demand I have in mind is the demand for happiness: Suicide rates are up, depression is up, and though people today seek to be happy, as in all ages they do, they say they aren’t. The supply is an explosion of books, conferences, and college and business school courses on being happy, and the emergence of happiness gurus and celebrities.

The scholarly element is the new field of happiness studies, sometimes called positive psychology. Its prehistory seems to lie in the humanistic psychology movement typified by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, who urged practitioners not to dwell exclusively on pathology and mental illness but to consider the elements of well-being. Today led by such figures as Martin Seligman and Jonathan Haidt, the field has left those beginnings far behind. No longer just an academic theory, it has surpassed the stages of bloom, vogue, and fad to become a full-blown, galloping movement. I would by no means say that such an important topic as human happiness does not deserve scholarly attention. And yet the field exhibits some disturbing features, as galloping movements usually do.

The University of Pennsylvania, home to the Positive Psychology Center, hosted the First World Congress on Positive Psychology in 2009. These congresses have become an annual event, organized by the International Positive Psychology Association. So far, by my count, only one university offers a degree program in happiness studies, but a fair number offer certificates or concentrations, and many schools offer courses. The happiness course at Harvard is the most popular in the university’s history, enrolling up to 1,400 students at a time.

Some such courses are designed for the general student, whereas others target psychologists, counselors, or managers. A handbook published by Oxford University Press presents research that applies happiness studies to businesses and other organizations, with the aim of making workers not just happy but “elevat[ed]” and “inspir[ed].” The happiness studies movement has also spawned business opportunities of its own. The instructor of Harvard’s happiness course is an entrepreneur who urges visitors to his website to “Join the Happiness Revolution” by earning a certificate at his Happiness Academy.

If enrollees in this and similar programs expect happiness credentials to enhance their career opportunities, they may be right. Consider the World Happiness Summit, an annual gala that brings happiness enthusiasts together with a collection of psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, yoga teachers, life coaches, entrepreneurs, educational administrators, “master teachers,” and “chief happiness officers” of various firms, along with a person bizarrely described as the “Indiana Jones of Positive Psychology.” Many of these speakers represent entire organizational networks. Did I call happiness studies a movement? It is beginning to look like an ecosystem, with experts, thinkers, promoters, and sales specialists occupying various ecological niches.

It would be cheap to tax serious scholars of happiness with the silliness and excesses of the more enthusiastic votaries. But anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with the tradition of reflection on human fulfillment, a tradition that includes Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, can’t help but be disappointed. A New York Times interview with Yale “happiness professor” Lauri Santos exemplifies the ways in which the happiness studies movement lets us down. Santos’s research focuses on cognition and cognitive development in dogs and monkeys. But she has been teaching a popular course on human happiness since 2018, and producing podcasts about happiness with millions of downloads.

At the end of the interview, the Times asks, “So what’s the answer? What’s the purpose of life?” Santos answers: “It’s smelling your coffee in the morning. [Laughs.] Loving your kids. Having sex and daisies and springtime. It’s all the good things in life. That’s what it is.” In other words, she doesn’t know.

These matters are difficult to think through, challenging to explain. And Santos says some good and important things. She challenges the fixation of many students on money, which is not pertinent to happiness except for those below the poverty line. Her students fight her about this, and she fights them back. Bravo. But when she reaches her positive prescriptions, we find we can gain equally useful insights from greeting cards and embroidered samplers—in fact, better. At least the platitude “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” responds to the problem of suffering. “Have all the good things” doesn’t. What is the secret to enjoying the good things? What shall we say to the people who have them all, but find they aren’t enough? Between 1999 and 2019, suicide rates increased by 33 percent—and that was before the pandemic. I suspect that a lot of the people comprehended by that statistic smelled coffee, liked sex and daisies and springtime, and at least tried to love their kids.

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