The Happiness Industry That Won't Let You Die

The other day, I was watching the Oscar-winning film ‘The Lives of Others’ after having discovered about the Stasi and what it did in East Germany during the Cold War era. In the movie, suicide by one of the characters proves to be a major plot point as it forces the protagonist, a writer who generally toed the line of the Communist Regime, to write about the state of affairs in the country seen through the prism of increasing suicide rates. The movie tells us how the Communist regime hid suicide statistics to not embarrass itself on the world stage, for in those numbers lay the story of how unhappy the society under a draconian government was.

This bit in the brilliant film, though disputed as I later discovered, nudged me towards a thought that, in return, nudged me towards this piece.

The events in the past few years in my personal life have revealed a lot to me about the nature of life and the suffering survival entails. Lately, I have begun to see life as a series of losses that take away from us bit by bit the good of life and in some cases the desire to live. I think it’s best captured in the lines I wrote a couple of years ago

“For so many of us, our existence in itself is a monument to so much that we silently endure throughout our lives. We lose times and dreams that we had dreamt of living in those times. We lose hopes that once drove us towards the future. We lose love over and over again. We lose people that gave meaning to our lives. We lose memories that made life seem like the best gift. We lose our best shapes. We lose our best days.

We go through so much carrying the enormous weight of the past, and yet we move ahead with it. It’s no mean feat to lose and lose and lose and to still go on. There is so much that leaves us that never comes back. And there are so many who we leave and never look back at. We are all walking under a massive cloud of the past. All the time.

For all that we silently lose and suffer, our mere existence is such an unsung yet a glorious achievement. It’s nothing less than an invisible badge of courage that we wear all the time.”

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I know it’s foolish to look at the entire human population through the lens of your personal experience, but the losses I have endured in the past few years have only strengthened my belief in life being a canvas of losses and suffering. Then why do we continue to suffer? Because we are programmed to not put an ending to that suffering by something that I call the Happiness Industry.

The general notion about suicides has remained largely similar across societies through the ages. To put it simply, it’s something that’s considered inexcusably wrong; something to be looked down upon. Except in the battlefield, where sometimes giving up your own life for a larger cause is valorized, societies across the world look at suicides as ‘quitting’, an attempt at which has been made criminal in most societies. Life, a gift, is supposed to be not given up on and the purpose of it is to find happiness to lead a ‘good’ life. Those who suffer are told to have faith and patience for the fortunes to turn around. Some are exhorted to find happiness in their suffering. The world, however, has scant respect for those who decide to put an end to their suffering.

 The dead are chastised for not trying to have held on to life which, in opposition to the morbidity of death, is seen as something full of opportunities that the one who quit missed out on. It’s seen as wrong and abnormal. The right and the normal is to live and hope, even if it means a continuation of suffering.

In Cold War-era Germany, suicides threatened to punch a hole in the ‘all is well behind the Iron Curtain’ narrative of the Communist regime which possibly proved to be the reason behind them being not talked about enough. The end of the Cold War managed to expose the Communist regimes and what they did with their own people. especially in Eastern Europe. However, with the fall of Communism, what won made the acceptance of suicides even more difficult for the society. In fact, strange as it might sound, Capitalism can’t afford suicides in the same way that the Communist government of East Germany couldn’t.

The win of liberal democracy at the conclusion of the Cold War was supposed to be the end of oppressive regimes across the world and make lives across the world better with greater freedom and greater opportunities. Capitalism, which is so good at selling commodities, sold the world the dream. But as it happens so often, the reality didn’t meet the dreams shown. People still took the decision to put an end to their miseries, something they’d done before as well but which now dug a deeper hole in the narrative that the capitalist world wanted to push. The undesirability of suicides in society grew.

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Suicide and the resultant grief that it leaves in the heart of those left behind disturbs the social fabric in a capitalist society more because it shouts aloud that something somewhere wasn’t right, as opposed to the vision of the perfect world capitalism sells us. A world moving rapidly in one direction (towards the future) finds it discomforting to pause, like any vehicle whose cog in one of the wheels has malfunctioned. One way to avoid that discomfort for the society is by discouraging that action which resulted in that discomfort. And one way to do it is by discrediting those who took the plunge. The society’s discomfort at having to pause and deal with it partly proved to be the breeding ground of the stigma around suicides. And that’s how suicides came to be equated with ‘losing’ at life. It is often dismissed as a mere blip in judgment, something that the person would possibly regret having done if there was an afterlife. The narrative often completely undermines the person’s decision-making ability, and worse, obscures the conditions that led to the decision.

While the politics of the day did result in East Germany obscuring suicide numbers, it’s still a matter of debate how much of that politics caused it. On the contrary, I feel there lies a deep-rooted connection in the politics of the day and suicides, or, at least, in its perception. While taking one’s own life was already a taboo because of reasons discussed above, the spread of liberal democracy allowed Capitalism to create something that I called above the Happiness Industry.

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When I use the term Happiness Industry, I’m not being a conspiracy theorist in claiming that there is an overarching Illuminati like secret organization that pulls the strings of the world. What I mean is that, as humans, we are largely inclined to move towards pleasure than pain. And knowing our large appetite for pleasure and happiness, everything around, especially in a capitalist society, is selling us happiness. Every product in a capitalist society insists that it can make our lives better. The refrigerator will help us beat the summer blues. The blankets will save us from the chilly winters. The fancy car will take us to the destination of our dreams. And what not! Everything is wrapped in covers of comfort and positivity. Everything, from the movies to the magazines tells us why we need to ‘live more’! This happiness industry keeps shoving down people’s throat the hope of a good life. More importantly, the hope of a better future.

All of this plays a major part in shaping our perceptions about life, death as well as suicide. Not only does the difference in the happiness promised by life in general and the happiness achieved becomes a major cause for anxiety and depression in some cases, the Happiness Industry also wraps up in a bubble that makes suicide look more like a mistake. This Happiness Industry wants you to live, no matter what. Suicides expose the frailties of the happiness industry, telling how inadequate our lives are despite the lofty promises of this industry. That’s why it keeps on telling you that today’s suffering is worth it because things will change tomorrow. And it always tells you that the change will be for the better. It also shapes our notions of happiness by romanticizing the mundane and elevating it to a place where it becomes a source of happiness. The popular media would impress upon you the need to find happiness in the smallest of things.

The ones who buy into the idea of material happiness and get enticed by the dream that the happiness industry sells them, lengthen their suffering. In this way, it is guilty of abetting human suffering as well as in some cases, suicides resulting from the inability to come to terms with the gap between the false expectations set by the Happiness Industry about life and the starkly different reality.

The demonization of suicides in the society is an important tool for those in power to keep it from descending into chaos. The realization that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, or in the case of some lives, even in the journey is capable of depriving many of their will to live and driving them crazy. This can potentially destabilize the society’s fabric and fuel anarchy to send it into a tailspin. Neither a liberal democracy can afford it nor the capitalist economy. The Happiness Industry, thus, keeps it from falling apart by feeding this phantom called the hope of a good future, which keeps humanity from getting in touch with their despair in their hearts. It keeps them alive, but in a state of eternal contradiction, as hoping and suffering beings while shaming those who chose for themselves and decided to end their sufferings.