Bright-Sided

Also by Barbara Ehrenreich

This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War

The Snarling Citizen

Kipper’s Game

The Worst Years of Our Lives:

Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed

Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

The Hearts of Men:

American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment

Global Woman:

Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy

Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex

For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness

The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State

Metropolitan Books

Henry Holt and Company

New York

Metropolitan Books

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10010

[http://www.henryholt.com] www.henryholt.com

Metropolitan BooksTM and
TM are registered

trademarks of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Copyright © 2009 by Barbara Ehrenreich

All rights reserved.

Distributed in Canada by H. B. Fenn and Company Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

2009023588

Henry Holt books are available for special promotions

and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

First Edition 2009

Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To complainers everywhere:

Turn up the volume!

A
mericans are a “positive” people. This is our reputation as well as our self-image. We smile a lot and are often baffled when people from other cultures do not return the favor. In the well-worn stereotype, we are upbeat, cheerful, optimistic, and shallow, while foreigners are likely to be subtle, world-weary, and possibly decadent. American expatriate writers like Henry James and James Baldwin wrestled with and occasionally reinforced this stereotype, which I once encountered in the 1980s in the form of a remark by Soviet émigré poet Joseph Brodsky to the effect that the problem with Americans is that they have “never known suffering.” (Apparently he didn’t know who had invented the blues.) Whether we Americans see it as an embarrassment or a point of pride, being positive—in affect, in mood, in outlook—seems to be engrained in our national character.

Who would be churlish or disaffected enough to challenge these happy features of the American personality? Take the business of
positive “affect,” which refers to the mood we display to others through our smiles, our greetings, our professions of confidence and optimism. Scientists have found that the mere act of smiling can generate positive feelings within us, at least if the smile is not forced. In addition, good feelings, as expressed through our words and smiles, seem to be contagious: “Smile and the world smiles with you.” Surely the world would be a better, happier place if we all greeted one another warmly and stopped to coax smiles from babies—if only through the well-known social psychological mechanism of “mood contagion.” Recent studies show that happy feelings flit easily through social networks, so that one person’s good fortune can brighten the day even for only distantly connected others.
1

Furthermore, psychologists today agree that positive feelings like gratitude, contentment, and self-confidence can actually lengthen our lives and improve our health. Some of these claims are exaggerated, as we shall see, though positive feelings hardly need to be justified, like exercise or vitamin supplements, as part of a healthy lifestyle. People who report having positive feelings are more likely to participate in a rich social life, and vice versa, and social connectedness turns out to be an important defense against depression, which is a known risk factor for many physical illnesses. At the risk of redundancy or even tautology, we can say that on many levels, individual and social, it is
good
to be “positive,” certainly better than being withdrawn, aggrieved, or chronically sad.

So I take it as a sign of progress that, in just the last decade or so, economists have begun to show an interest in using happiness rather than just the gross national product as a measure of an economy’s success. Happiness is, of course, a slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of
positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day but then was cheered up by a bit of good news, so what am I really? In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction—but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results, “Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine—clearly not an income effect.”
2