The Happy Paradox

5/2/2019 The Happy Paradox
The Happy Paradox

Notes from ongoing research by Francesco Garutti. Photographs by Jussi
Puikkonen
October 2018
In a review of William Davies’s book, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World,
British journalist Suzanne Moore begins by referencing John Lanchester’s July 2018 essay
“After the Fall,” in the London Review of Books, which examines our current anxiety-
producing sociopolitical situation. As Moore paraphrases: “To understand anything about
the state of the world today, you [have] to look at what led to the [financial] crash 10 years
1
ago and its aftermath—and to do that, you need not economists but sociologists.”
Now more than ever, we are paying attention to behavioural economics—the study of the
psychological and emotional factors that influence financial movements and monetary
decisions. We are entering an era in which psychologists and social scientists play an
increasingly central role in not only evaluating and measuring the relationship between
quality of life and psycho-physical well-being but also tracing the transformation of our
economy and real estate markets.
Questions and issues that explicitly address an emotional sphere, but are seemingly
peripheral to spatial planning, now make up the generative principles that characterize
design in the new era of Gross National Happiness, or GNH—How much time do I spend
with my family? In what way can I map and plan out time spent with friends? What does it
really mean to be a good neighbour? What hopes do I have for my future? On whom will I
rely when I’m old? How many times have I been truly happy in a year? What role does my
job have in my life? What role does my house have in my life?
Jussi Puikkonen, photographer. View over Helsinki on a summer night, Finland, 2015.
https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/issues/27/will-happiness-find-us/64484/the-happy-paradox 1/11
January 2017
The Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness is launched in the United Kingdom. One year later,
Prime Minister Theresa May works to structure new policies focused on happiness and
well-being, adding loneliness to the then brief of Minister of Sport and Civil Society in order
2
to tackle the generational challenge of loneliness.
February 2016
The government of the United Arab Emirates appoints a Minister of State for Happiness
whose responsibility is to “harmonise all government plans, programmes and policies to
3
achieve a happier society.”
November 2015
Robert Waldinger, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Zen priest, and Director of the Harvard Study
of Adult Development gives a talk at TEDxBeaconStreet called “What makes a good life?
4
Lessons from the longest study on happiness.”
In the last decade the definition of happiness itself has undergone a profound
transformation due to advances in the variability and scope of data collection. Well-being is
tracked daily through both new technologies of measurement embedded in various
contexts—in our workplaces, our homes, and our public spaces—as well as directly on our
bodies through the mobile devices that are equipped with mood tracking, sentiment
5
analysis, algorithms, facial recognition systems, and subliminal polls of various types. It is
through the massive influx of intimate and personal questions, sentimental projections,
and private desires collected by these new technologies that we are able to understand the
individualization of ideas of happiness.
A new serenity economy—characterized by materials and surfaces for sleep, digital

systems to control the home, urban safety systems that oscillate between darkness and
sustainable lighting, plans for using nature from the wild to the urban—is taking shape
within the context of the political and marketing campaigns that rebrand the ambiguously
individualistic nature of the very notion of happiness.
October 2014
6
The WELL Building Standard for human health and well-being is launched, establishing a
system for architecture evaluating homes, workplaces, and public buildings according to
psycho-physical factors. WELL broadens the discussion on conscious design beyond LEED
certification, the rating system which was introduced in 2000 to evaluate buildings based
on energy and environmental design criteria. Both certifications have since expanded their
scope of applicability beyond the building. China also addresses well-being at a territorial
scale in 2014 by releasing a “rural social harmony index,” which evaluates happiness in the
rural life according to indicators such as democracy, justice, stability, honesty, vitality, and
7
the “relationship between man and nature.”
January 2013
As part of their Internet & American Life Project, the American “fact tank” Pew Research
Center, completes the first national survey of self-tracking for health related conditions. The
survey found that sixty-nine percent of American adults self-tracked at least one health
indicator and that twenty-one percent of those respondents used some form of technology
8
to do so.
Jussi Puikkonen, photographer. Smoke from a sauna

chimney covering the path to the lake, Finland, 2017.
Jussi Puikkonen, photographer. Jaakko taking a dip in

lake Petäjärvi, Kylmälä, Finland, 2017.
March 2012
Edited by John Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, the first World Happiness
Report proposes to integrate the principles of the United Nations Conference on
Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (concretized in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development that was ratified in 2015), by measuring well-being and happiness levels in
220 countries.
These happiness indices and urban well-being rankings go viral. While national statistics
offices worldwide had long been collecting census data, the significance of subjective data
is emphasized through the media, catalyzing countries to frame their findings according to
new lexicons. The media coverage of well-being classifications transforms happiness into
an ideology. Studies like the Happy Planet Index, the World Happiness Report, and the
Global Livability Index—produced by, respectively, the New Economics Foundation, the
United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and The Economist
Intelligence Unit—become political tools that are able to influence certain decision-making
processes within design. New handbooks for happiness are conceived as protocols for
evaluating and redefining broad sets of issues, from the principles of sustainability to the
design of space according to criteria of security, from a new conception of comfort to a new
9
understanding of the relationship between work and free time.
November 2011
The United Nations recognizes the inadequacy of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a
measure of well-being. Happiness research is refined, codified, catalogued, and studied on
a global political scale as the essential/unavoidable goal of every human being.
November 2010
Prime Minister David Cameron gives a speech outlining his National Well-Being
Programme: “Today the government is asking the Office of National Statistics to devise a
new way of measuring wellbeing in Britain. And so from April next year, we’ll start
measuring our progress as a country, not just by how our economy is growing, but by how
10
our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life.” A key
actor in shaping this mandate is Richard Layard, labour economist and Director of the Well-
Being Programme at The London School of Economics, who was asked by Tony Blair in the
late1990s to evaluate and reduce the social scourge of misery, depression, and mental
illness in the United Kingdom—culminating in The Depression Report: A New Deal for
Depression and Anxiety Disorders, produced by The Centre for Economic Performance at
LSE.
The proliferation of questions related to subjective well-being (SWB), the obsessive

attention to detecting feelings and emotions, and the need to quantify one’s most private
self all have transformed the collection of data on happiness data and its
instrumentalization: on one hand, this data becomes a revelatory machine of new value
systems, a potential tool that can give a private reading of our present and, on the other
hand, it generates new procedures for the construction of a possible world that sits
ambiguously on the border between a generic reality and, as defined by André Spicer, “the
11
cult of compulsory happiness.”
January 2009
Work begins on the creation of the first Canadian Index of Well-Being: Measuring What
Matters. Structured on the British model, it is designed to compose “a unidimensional
12
index to reasonably represent a multidimensional construct of human well-being.”
February 2008
Nicolas Sarkozy institutes the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance

and Social Progress, led by economists Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul
Fitoussi, to reconsider GDP data as the sole measurement of a nation’s wellbeing. The final
report was submitted in September 2009 and subsequently published as a book, titled
Mismeasuring Our Lives, Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up, in April 2010.
The Commission’s report is a revolutionary document, suggesting that the traditional tools
to measure a country’s social and economic progress are incorrect and inconsistent: “When
problems of globalization and environmental and resource sustainability are combined,
13
GDP metrics may be especially misleading.” The faulty perception of the codependence
between wealth and well-being is the central distinction in the attempt to describe and
evaluate our lives in a different way. The line graphs depicting an apparent corollary
between happiness and income in industralized countries such as the United States,
England, and Japan in the last fifty years are in fact clear proof that well-being does not
increase as a consequence of the constant growth of wealth. Mis-Measuring Our Lives is
celebrated as for a watershed moment in the emergence of what would soon be defined as
the Happiness Agenda.
Well-being, which emerged as a political tool for confronting the post-2008 recession and
redefining quality of life, has transformed in only a few years into a branch of social science
with extended and increasingly fluid disciplinary borders. On the fine line between
fetishism and obsession, opportunity and resources, quantified feelings and the global
manuals for well-being are now one of the most interesting and revealing areas of study
for understanding the transformations of the present.
Jussi Puikkonen, photographer. The sauna at a family’s summer house in Lakeland, Finland, 2015.
1972
The King of Bhutan, Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, describes happiness in the Bhutan Planning
Commission as the central principle upon which to base a new approach to national
planning. In 1974, the American economist Richard Easterlin explores happiness further in
his study, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical
Evidence.”[^14] Used for the first time as a benchmark to assess quality of life, happiness
becomes central to global politics at the dawn of the most recent economic crisis in 2008.
In this historical moment, then, it is interesting to explore and dissect the project of
happiness, precisely because it is based on new parameters of so-called measurement and
a notion of a topography constructed through real-time, digital feedback: a landscape of
data that maps out and weaves together the public sphere with the most personal and
private; a geography of information that detects and designs, but also blurs, the distinction
between necessity and pleasure, and therefore also obscures social equality.
13
In this last decade of the happiness agenda, we have experienced an emotional boom.
The market today feeds off of affective relationships and is increasingly directed toward
14
processes of “emotionalization.” It is fast, flexible, and free. Data collected from the most
secret sections of our phones is bought and sold in today’s market. By tracing souls and
exchanging thoughts, rather than numbers and objects, the market studies individuals
rather than masses. It is unstable and volatile and always moves from the micro to the
macro level. Today, a time when the ability to trace feelings drives the dynamics that
regulate the neoliberal economy: the market mobilizes the data of our digital subconscious
—between happiness and sadness, joy and melancholy—in order to transform the space in
which we live.
And now, in a moment when the digital world offers “new adventures in conceptual and
mental spaces,” the discipline of architecture increasingly seems to focus its attention on
“physical and material experiences and the various emotions generated or offered by these
15
experiences not available in the cyberspace.” It is as if the actual project of space today—
political, conveyor of meanings and visions—were necessarily a private and emotional one.
And, maybe, its exact opposite as well.
Francesco Garutti is the curator of our upcoming exhibition Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of
Emotional Capitalism
1 Suzanne Moore, review of Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World, by William Davies, The
Guardian, 28 October 2018.
2 “Minister for loneliness appointed to continue Jo Cox’s work,” BBC News, 17 January 2018.
3 The Official Portal of the UAE Government, “Minister of State for Happiness and Wellbeing.”
4 Robert Waldinger, “What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness,” Brookline,
Massachusetts, 14 November 2015.
5 William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being
(London: Verso, 2015), 11.
6 The WELL Building Standard
7 Michael Bristow, “China measures rural happiness with ‘social harmony’ index,” BBC News, 13 May 2014.
8 “Tracking for Health,” Pew Research Center, 28 January 2013.
9 According to Rem Koolhaas, comfort, security, and sustainability are now the “dominant values of our
culture.” Koolhaas, “My Thoughts On the Smart City,” transcript, High Level Group Meeting on Smart
Cities, Brussels, 24 September 2014.
10 Prime Minister David Cameron, “PM speech on wellbeing,” 25 November 2010.
11 André Spicer, “The cult of compulsory happiness is ruining our workplaces,” The Guardian, 12 December
2016.
12
A.C. Michalos, et al., The Canadian Index of Wellbeing, Technical Report 1.0 (Waterloo, CA: Canadian Index 13
of Wellbeing and University of Waterloo), October 2011, iii.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Mis-Measuring Our Lives: Why GDP Does’t Add Up 12
(New York: The New Press, 2010), xxv.
Richard Easterlin, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence,” in Nations 13
and Households in Economic Growth, ed. Paul A. David and Melvin W. Reder (New York: Academic Press,
1974), 89-125.
Byung-Chul Han, Psycho-Politics Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power (London: Verso, 2017), 47. 14
André Gorz, The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and Capital (London: Seagull Books, 2010), quoted in Han, 15
Psycho-Politics.
Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Ayr and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2016 Berlin Biennale Catalogue (Berlin: KW
Institute of Contemporary Art, 2016), 216.
Canadian Centre for Architecture

1920, rue Baile Montréal, Québec H3H 2S6 Canada
www.cca.qc.ca

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The Happy Paradox

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5/2/2019 The Happy Paradox

The Happy Paradox

A new serenity economy—characterized by materials and surfaces for sleep, digital

Jussi Puikkonen, photographer. Smoke from a sauna

Jussi Puikkonen, photographer. Jaakko taking a dip in

The proliferation of questions related to subjective well-being (SWB), the obsessive

Nicolas Sarkozy institutes the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance

Canadian Centre for Architecture

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