The Politics of Happiness: Why It’s Not Just About You

Is happiness really just a personal thing?

We often think of happiness as a personal thing - something we each define for ourselves, whether that’s through joy, pleasure, or a sense of purpose. But what if happiness isn’t just about how we feel inside? What if it’s also something shaped and used by governments, economists, and policymakers to guide how we live?

Over the last few decades, happiness has become more than just a feeling. It’s been turned into something we’re told we can measure, optimise, and even achieve with the right habits. Positive psychology, for example, has helped popularise the idea that happiness isn’t just a vague, fluffy idea - but a real, trackable part of the human experience. That sounds great on the surface. But when you dig a little deeper, it raises big questions about who gets to define happiness, what it means to be “well,” and how all of this affects the way we live our lives.

Happiness as a way of governing

In today’s world - especially in countries that follow a neoliberal model, where personal responsibility is front and centre - happiness has quietly become a tool of soft power. Rather than controlling people through laws or force, governments can now influence how we behave by shaping what we think we should strive for. Happiness is one of those goals.

This shift can be seen in how we’ve moved from talking about “welfare” (which focuses on protecting people when things go wrong) to talking about “wellbeing” (which places the emphasis on the individual to take care of themselves). Instead of being supported by the state, we’re encouraged to become entrepreneurs of our own lives by making choices, setting goals, and constantly improving ourselves. But not everyone has the same access to time, money, or opportunities. This narrative can end up punishing those who are already struggling by implying that if they’re unhappy, it’s their fault.

Psychology hasn’t just watched this shift happen: it’s helped make it possible. Research into happiness has created tools and frameworks that shape how people think about their own lives. Wellbeing experts, coaches, and therapists help people apply these ideas. And while this can be empowering, it can also reinforce the message that if you’re not happy, you’re doing something wrong.

From Big Government to Big Society

This idea of happiness as a policy goal goes even further. In the UK, for example, the government has explicitly focused on boosting national wellbeing. One major example was the “Big Society” initiative under David Cameron, which encouraged local communities and volunteers to take over services that had previously been run by the state. In theory, this was about empowering people. In practice, it often meant that individuals were expected to do more with less support.

To back this up, reports like MINDSPACE (written by behavioural scientists for the UK government) offered ways to “nudge” people into healthier, happier choices - like eating better, exercising, or working harder. These nudges are meant to be subtle, cost-effective, and non-coercive. But they’re also based on the idea that individuals should be “optimising” their own lives, as if life were a constant self-improvement project.

This thinking has crept into healthcare, education, and employment policy too. Campaigns like the NHS’s “5 a Day” are designed to give simple tips for better wellbeing. Again, this can be helpful, but it also places the responsibility for health and happiness squarely on the individual, even when the biggest barriers are structural.

Can you really measure happiness?

If happiness is being used to shape public policy, then it needs to be measured. That’s why governments have started collecting data on how happy people say they are, using national surveys and wellbeing indexes like the OECD’s Better Life Index.

But measuring happiness isn’t straightforward. First, it’s subjective: one person’s joy might be another’s boredom. And second, people interpret survey questions in different ways. Are we talking about how they feel today? This week? In general? Are we measuring pleasure, purpose, or something else entirely?

These surveys also miss how much our answers are shaped by context. We often give the answers we think we “should” give. In that sense, happiness data isn’t so much found as it is created - shaped by the social norms around us. That makes it hard to draw firm conclusions or create meaningful policy from the results.

The problem with expecting everyone to be happy

Perhaps the biggest issue with using happiness as a social goal is that it can marginalise people who don’t - or can’t - feel happy. If happiness becomes a benchmark of success, then unhappiness is treated as a personal failure. That’s a problem, especially for people facing real hardship.

Scholars like Sara Ahmed have pointed out that in a culture obsessed with positivity, negative emotions get pushed aside or pathologised. If you're sad, angry, or disillusioned, it’s not seen as a valid response to injustice: it’s something you’re expected to fix. But often, it’s not the person that’s broken. It’s the system they’re living in.

For people dealing with poverty, racism, discrimination, or other systemic issues, the pressure to perform happiness can feel like just one more impossible expectation. And the tools that are supposed to help like self-help books, therapy apps, resilience training, can end up reinforcing the idea that it’s all on you.

So what does this mean for psychology?

Psychology has played an important role in helping us understand what makes people happy. But it’s also played a part in promoting a very particular version of happiness - one that aligns with neoliberal values like independence, self-discipline, and optimism. These values aren’t neutral. They reflect specific cultural and political ideologies, and they don’t work for everyone.

By focusing so heavily on individual responsibility, we risk ignoring the bigger picture. If we really care about happiness, we need to look beyond the individual and ask: what are the social, economic, and political conditions that make happiness possible? And who is being left out of the story we’re telling?

This article is adapted from an essay prepared as part of my BSc Psychology degree. ChatGPT has been used to convert the essay into an easily readable article.