Measurement of Happiness - Coursework Example

When Happiness is To Have? In a society in which the ultimate measure of success is economic through concepts such as profitability, personal happiness today is posited to be achieved through consumption. This is because forces are at work, wrote Weeks, Berman and Bisbee, to ensure that as many goods and services as possible are traded privately and publicly. (p. 240) As a result, happiness with terms of ones person, well-being today, is attributable to the purchase of the appropriate mix of goods and services and of needs, luxuries and leisure. The Consumerist Culture The media is one of the most important drivers in the way consumption has characterized happiness in the modern world. The content in the newspaper, television, films, radio, songs and the Internet encourage people to define themselves in what they consume. This is demonstrated in the emphasis of media coverage on wealth, opulence, the big house and the big cars. With these trappings of success, wrote Sparks and Tulloch (2000), the readers and audiences of the media are encouraged to believe, comes happiness. (p. 106) The mantra, “looking good, feeling great” also underscores this preoccupation in the media. People are encouraged to wear fashionable clothes, trendy accessories, the right kind of makeup, food to eat, exercise and place to go and live because these factors are supposed to what give people satisfaction and gratification equated with modern happiness. This is the reason why today, happiness is now mostly determined by the rate of real wages of the quality of affluence of people. Bruni and Porta (2007), in their studies and review of existing literature on the subject, found that consumption drives the economics of happiness. (p. 62) Here, the amount of money a laborer takes home determines his happiness and those of his family because it satisfies their basic needs and the satisfaction of the secondary and luxurious needs further heightens the happiness meter. One is reminded by Dutt that the goal of economic activity, as taken by most mainstream economists, is to achieve efficiency and this is achieved through consumption because the market always require the maximization of value of products and services. (p. 1) Consumption also has some underlying social dimensions, which allowed it to be successfully accepted and integrated in today’s age of equality, unprecedented freedom and claim to rights and privileges. In talking about this aspect, Erens (1990) stressed that the rediscovery of the body after the era of Puritanism and under the signs of physical and sexual liberation, there was the supposed empowerment of women through the empowering forces of consumerism present in goods and services as promoted by advertising, fashion, mass culture; including the hygienic, dietetic and therapeutic cults that surround it. (p. 106) There emerged the obsession on youth, elegance, virility/femininity, treatments, diets, and sacrificial practices that all paid testament to the importance of the body. This variable has so complemented the resurgence of the female in the later 20th and 21st centuries. The effects today, however, is ironic. Frank (1998), for instance, observed that as media molds everyone to assume more passive roles, into more frantic consuming, and, in the process, forces on women and emotional and nonintellectual role – a consumer who isn’t supposed to think or act beyond the confines of her purchases – her dresses, makeup, kitchen, magazines, her home. (p. 230) The media has reinforced how hedonism restricted happiness to consumption and leisure to the exclusion of productive labor expressed by a valid judgment about a society in which more important factors such as labor, morality, among others, remained alienated. (Jay 1996, p. 59) There is a growing recognition that the correlation between consumption or consumerism with happiness is a negative phenomenon. However, there are those who see the positive side of it. Dutt argued that consumption not only produces happiness but also has positive consequences, including giving people the incentive to work, trade, innovate for a better life, leading to a higher level of production and economic growth. Jansson-Boyd (2009) also stressed that consumption and the consumerist culture could, in fact, serve the purposes of the evolutionary development of the human race. Her argument is that this variable fills a practical function in the evolutionary process by citing this example: A man who buys and drives an expensive car and wears an expensive watch will clearly signal to women that he can afford to look after their offspring and consequently he will be seen as a more desirable mate than a man who may not display the same kind of wealth. (p. 179) This point, as stressed by Jansson-Boyd, underscores how the consumerist attitude is parallel to the concept of the survival of the fittest, wherein the most capable survive and reproduce, with material possessions as pawns in the evolutionary process. Consumerism and Frustration According to Becker (1977), as man toils everyday, to succeed in carrying out his purpose in life, there come points wherein there would be the absence of necessary tools and materials that frustrates his objectives, which eventually interferes with his happiness. Here, the acquisition, possession, use and consumption of things reduces and eliminates such frustration. (p. 62) The author further cited how Aristotle argued that individual ownership creates a more thorough and stable community of interests, and better promotes efficient, economical, and careful use of things. (p. 62) However, this “frustration” argument goes both ways. While it could speak positively for consumption and its role in achieving happiness, it also has its downsides. The way we perceive love, for instance, in the context of consumption and happiness leads to frustration. Today, love has become relegated to a commodity which people expect to have, one that can be wished, and acquired immediately. This has been influenced by the consumerist culture, which created a system wherein everything is virtually available with the minimum effort. Here, love is considered a substance, an object of gratification and that it absence becomes an experience similar to lacking material possessions and that receiving and providing love is like the in and out flow of goods and services. (Kotarba and Vannini, p. 62) A song, for instance by Lyte Funkie Ones (1999) pleaded: “Without you in my life, I guess the whole thing would be empty.” The danger here is that since love is actually not a commodity and could not be achieved through any means provided by consumerism, this frustrates people endlessly. Several other examples of the adverse effect of consumerism has been outlined by Bulbeck (2009): Rural immigrants that flock into the cities in search for higher wages and better, “happy” lives are condemned and discriminated; consumerism has resulted to the modernization of intimate relations; sex for pay becomes rampant to the point of becoming normal occurrences especially among the young people; and, the desire for novel cosmopolitan humanity has been expressed in consumption through work and sex. (p. 121-123) To justify that consumption is not the only factor there is to achieving happiness today and to illustrate that in most instances, it is not actually required, there was the finding of DeLeire and Kalil’s study that in America, there are only two components of consumption that are positively related to happiness – leisure consumption and vehicle consumption. They pointed to the fact that there is an inconsistent correlation between economic growth and happiness in developed countries because people therein, when surveyed, rated themselves as only fairly happy and satisfied with their lives, almost irrespective of their income levels. (p. 3) It is at this point wherein another case of frustration comes in. Tibor Scitovsky suggested that pleasure is related to increases in stimulation and, hence, to the rate of growth of consumption but that the excessive innovation of new kinds of status goods have rendered the source of happiness to be accessible to many, causing the stagnation of happiness, especially in developed countries. (Dransfield 2004, p. 544) The rationale of this proposition is that goods confer happiness only at the expense of others who consume less of the good. But when the market is flooded with goods that everyone could afford, consumer frustration and stagnating levels of happiness emerge. In his discourse on materialism, Van Boven (2005) agreed, concluding that the more people aspire to materialistic goals, the less satisfied they are with life and, the more at risk they are for developing psychological disorders. (p. 139) Conclusion What the arguments and points raised by this paper tell us is that the body has eclipsed the soul as the main moral and ideological objectives of our existence today. Consumption and consumerism has permeated our lives and that money, the bodily needs, requirements and wants dominate our concept of the good life at the expense of the previously dominating concepts in the lives of man such as religion, relationships, and family, among others. Srivasta, Locke and Bartol (2002) maintained that this leads to terminal materialism – the pursuit of money above all other considerations for the purposes of purchase and consumption as well as to gain social status and generate envy – which is detrimental to life satisfaction. (p. 960) However, this does not mean that consumption is entirely evil. There are positive aspects to consuming and consumerism and this hugely rely on the motivations behind. These are demonstrated in the so-called sustainable consumptions outlined by Veenhoven (2004). (p. 3) All in all, it is difficult to generalize or judge what makes people happy – how consumerism makes lives better and contribute to the general improved of well being. It is particularly difficult because people tend to base judgments according to certain moral benchmarks. Setting aside this factor, one turns to the body of literature and research that examined the link between consumption and happiness. They found that there is, indeed, a relationship. But what is remarkable in these cases, is that it is not the money or product itself that gives people satisfaction, what figures most are the motives. With this in mind, one is led to conclude that happiness from consuming comes not from act itself but emerges out of the motivations behind it, which are driven by a number of other variables than simply the purchase of goods and services. 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