Introduction

Abstract

Contemporary Anglo-American society is awash with political, organizational and individual efforts to be happy. It is extant across the realms of: governmental debates and mandates, employment policies and management consultancy advice, news stories, television fiction and documentaries, psychology, self-help courses, and even school classrooms. This widespread cultural momentum towards happiness is a culmination of events that have transpired over the past circa three hundred “Industrialized” years since the Age of Enlightenment. Throughout this period up to the modern day, happiness has come to be defined as: pursuable and attainable, able to be measured scientifically and provided by legislation, spiritual, practicable, located within the individual and attainable in correlation with the surrounding capitalistic structure. Whereby a focus on one’s individual, hedonistic happiness is now morally defensible, and in accordance with what have become commonly accepted societal norms. This leads to the denouement of this book that, following on from the popularized coinage of Homo economicus (The Economist Online, 2005) and even Homo siliconvalleycus (Thrift, 2005h: 151): modern humankind is presently aspiring toward the neologistic genus of Homo happicus.

[A] new measure [of] our happiness … could give us a general picture of whether life is improving, and that does have a really practical purpose. It will open up a national debate about what really matters; not just in government but amongst people who influence our lives: the media, in business, the people who develop the products we use, and build the towns we live in and shape the culture we enjoy.

(David Cameron, 2010)

Cameron, D. (25/11/2010), on BBC News Politics, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11833241, accessed on 25th November, 2010.