Ruth Whippam is a British woman who just moved to the United States with her husband. She was being a stay-at-home mom for her toddler.
One day, she was just desperate for adult conversation. She just started talking to anyone she ran into; people at the park, grocery store clerk, etc. She points out that happiness is the over-achiever’s dream in America. That’s why you may hear things such as “She has a great job, but is she really happy?”
She likes how optimistic we are, but the pressure to be happy all of the time can be too much. She points out that the British are more cynical than Americans.
She says that not all of us are positive all day. We experience a range of emotions:
“… I didn’t really give a whole lot of dedicated thought to whether I was happy. Like most people, in any given day I will experience emotions and sensations including (but not limited to) hilarity, joy, irritation, ambivalence, excitement, embarrassment, paralyzing self-doubt, boredom, anxiety, guilt, heart-stopping love, resentment, pride, exhaustion, and the shrill, insistent buzz of uneaten chocolate somewhere in the house.”
Maybe this is my bipolar/depressed/anxious mind talking, but we are not all happy all of the time. Everybody has a mix of emotions during the day. We do preach a lot about happiness. I did a program in school called “positive education.”
We are not the happiest country in the world, even though we try to act like it. Whippam said:
“According to the World Health Organization, as well as being one of the least happy developed countries in the world, the United States is, by a wide margin, also the most anxious, with nearly a third of Americans likely to suffer from an anxiety disorder in their lifetime. A 2012 report by the American Psychological Association warned that the nation was on the verge of a ‘stress-induced public health crisis.'”
Here is a YouTube channel, Think Tank, talking about happiness in the United States:
Featured image Moyan Brenn via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
