Selling Happiness Through Illusions
The caring industry’s wellness and positivity products cannot provide self-esteem to those who do not already have it.
Capitalism can be likened to a spiral staircase. Every economic advance is like a circle completed, then comes a new problem, followed by a new circle above the old one, which means solving the problem, only to give rise to another problem and another circle, and so on. So it was with globalisation, which produced global prosperity but also hastened the spread of COVID, which led to the creation of new vaccines; or cars and planes, which led to mobility and loneliness, which led, in turn, to social media and new forms of connectedness. Out of these circles rising aloft comes the never-ending spiral we call our economy.
That never-ending spiral may have reached an end in a part of the economy known as the “caring industry.” It is not the caring industry itself, composed of thousands of psychologists, social workers, and coaches, that has ended. On the contrary, the number of caring professionals grows each year. The number of social workers, who deliver most of the psychotherapy in the US, rose from 680,000 in 2016 to 708,000 in 2021, with another nine percent increase expected by 2030. With social breakdown, people need other people to talk to about their everyday problems, and caring professionals fill this void. What has ended is any pretence that the problem of everyday unhappiness is evolving, that talking cures—including self-help and psychotherapy—are advancing, and that new circles are spiralling upwards, solving old problems, creating new ones, and solving those too.
The popular concepts of “self-esteem,” “wellness,” and “positivity,” along with the commercial treatments they spawned, exemplify this point. They each entered the economy in remarkably similar ways. People thought they represented new ways of finding happiness, yet the treatments often proved to be no more effective than a layperson’s reassuring words or common-sense reforms. Self-esteem programs, for instance, do not significantly improve student mental health or school performance, as was once thought. The benefit of corporate wellness programs appears to be short-lived and less than what can be accomplished by simply cutting back on pointless administrative work or unnecessarily long meetings. Positivity programs yield questionable benefits, and some psychologists are now more worried about “toxic positivity.”
The caring industry marketed self-esteem, wellness, and positivity training as a way to find happiness that bypassed the old requisites, such as enjoyable work, family, money, or love. That method has failed. True, the caring industry still sells other useful products, such as a facsimile of friendship, which eases the loneliness problem, although such friendship can be expensive. Mass-produced therapy chatbots will likely solve that problem in the future; a new circle will overlie the old one while generating new problems that we cannot foresee. But there will likely be no new circles in the direct-to-happiness sector that sells happiness through talk alone.
Nevertheless, the caring industry’s self-esteem, wellness, and positivity products continue to influence daily life in ways that irritate and threaten. They also push the already-contested politics of wealth redistribution to new levels of absurdity.
