The Happiness Mirage — How Neoliberalism Sells Us an Impossible Dream
Happiness and Neoliberal Ideology
In the introduction to Manufacturing Happy Citizens, Eva Illouz and Edgar Cabanas invoke the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness as a lens through which we can better understand the prevailing cultural narratives of happiness under neoliberal capitalism. The movie, which portrays the real-life journey of Christopher Gardner, offers a distilled image of modern happiness: an achievement attainable through sheer personal resilience, hard work, and emotional regulation. Will Smith, embodying Gardner, overcomes homelessness, poverty, and institutional barriers, finally securing a job at a prestigious brokerage firm, and thus, achieving his long-sought happiness.
The film’s portrayal of Gardner’s struggle is not just a celebration of individual triumph but a narrative aligned with neoliberal values. Neoliberalism, which places the onus of success on the individual, frames happiness as a personal project — a destination reached by “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps.” This neoliberal view emphasizes emotional fortitude and self-reliance, relegating systemic inequalities and institutional barriers to the background. Poverty, inequality, and social suffering become mere obstacles in the hero’s journey, not significant determinants of one’s ability to attain happiness.
As Gardner’s story unfolds on screen, it mirrors a broader societal trend where personal traits — resilience, emotional intelligence, and self-discipline — are valorized above all else. In neoliberal ideology, individual happiness is attainable by anyone, provided they possess the right attitude and work ethic. Gardner’s refusal to give up, his optimism in the face of adversity, and his ability to regulate his emotions, even in the depths of despair, are portrayed as the keys to his ultimate success. By focusing on Gardner’s individual traits, the narrative downplays the significance of systemic issues like economic inequality, rendering them almost irrelevant to his eventual triumph.
In this light, happiness becomes a personal project, a commodity to be earned and worked for, which directly aligns with neoliberal capitalist ideals. Illouz and Cabanas argue that such narratives serve to reinforce individualism and self-reliance, traits that benefit the capitalist system by shifting responsibility for well-being away from society and onto the individual. In this view, happiness is framed as an objective that can be reached if only one works hard enough and possesses the right attitude — a potent metaphor for the way neoliberalism commodifies emotional states and mental health.
The Neoliberal Commodification of Happiness
The commodification of happiness under neoliberal ideology extends far beyond the movie screen. Positive psychology, particularly its more mainstream branches, has become an essential component of this ideological superstructure. With its emphasis on personal responsibility, the control of emotions, and the cultivation of “positivity,” positive psychology promotes a vision of happiness that is not merely a personal choice but an individual moral obligation.
The central message here is simple: happiness is up to you. Your suffering is not caused by social injustice or economic inequality, but by your failure to cultivate the proper mindset. The happiness industry, then, becomes a tool for both the management of the self and the regulation of emotions in service of productivity. Workers, soldiers, and citizens are encouraged to think of themselves as the architects of their own well-being, regardless of their material conditions. In this way, the pursuit of happiness becomes not an act of liberation but one of servitude. We are encouraged to stretch and adapt to the logic of happiness — defined in narrow, consumerist terms — while ignoring the structural realities that constrain our lives.
For Illouz and Cabanas, happiness in its current form is not the supreme, self-evident good that positive psychologists and happiness economists would have us believe. Instead, it is a powerful tool for the neoliberal state to produce more compliant and obedient subjects. The figure of the modern worker or citizen is no longer one who is coerced into obedience by external forces; rather, the modern subject willingly internalizes the need to “work on themselves” and maximize their potential. This self-management, this relentless quest for self-improvement and emotional regulation, is not liberating but rather a new form of control.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the claim to individual happiness had a radical and transgressive edge. It was a challenge to the powers that sought to restrict personal freedom and individual expression. However, through a cruel irony of history, the pursuit of happiness has now been seamlessly woven into the fabric of contemporary power. Today, happiness is a tool for reinforcing the neoliberal order — a mechanism for encouraging self-regulation and personal responsibility while deflecting attention from systemic inequality and social injustice.
Happiness as a Moral Imperative: The Super-Ego Compulsion to Enjoy
In their book Manufacturing Happy Citizens, Illouz and Cabanas delve into the ways positive psychology not only commodifies happiness but turns it into a moral imperative. In the neoliberal framework, happiness is no longer a personal pursuit; it becomes a civic duty. A happy citizen, by this logic, is a productive, compliant citizen — a cog in the well-oiled machinery of capitalism. Through happiness, people are coerced into a form of self-management that aligns their personal well-being with economic and social productivity.
Positive psychology presents this moral duty to be happy as an ethical responsibility. To be unhappy is not just a personal failure, but a moral failing. Illouz and Cabanas argue that this framework encourages individuals to view their emotional state as a measure of their worth and their capacity to contribute to society. The “happy citizen” is thus an obedient worker, one who regulates their own emotional states to ensure maximum productivity and minimal disruption. The happiness imperative creates a seamless link between personal well-being and capitalist efficiency: a content worker is a productive worker, and a content citizen is a compliant citizen.
This framing of happiness as a moral obligation ties directly into Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the super-ego and the “compulsion to enjoy.” Žižek, drawing from Lacan, suggests that the super-ego in contemporary society does not simply command us to follow the rules — it commands us to enjoy. This injunction to be happy, to experience pleasure, is no longer a personal choice but an oppressive demand. The more we are told to enjoy life, the more we feel anxious and guilty for not achieving this elusive happiness.
In neoliberal culture, the compulsion to be happy is framed as both a moral duty and a personal achievement. The individual is burdened with the responsibility to constantly strive for happiness, creating a never-ending loop of self-improvement and emotional regulation. The failure to be happy is perceived not as a natural part of the human condition but as a deviation from the norm, a personal deficiency that must be corrected through more effort, therapy, or consumption.
Žižek’s idea of the super-ego ties in perfectly with the neoliberal happiness imperative. The more society demands that we be happy, the more this injunction becomes oppressive. Happiness, once framed as a personal right, has now morphed into an ideological duty, a command that weighs heavily on the subject. The more one tries to fulfill this command, the more it becomes unattainable. This super-egoic demand to enjoy exacerbates the gap between what we are told to achieve (happiness) and the realities of our human limitations.
In modern society, happiness has become more than just a personal pursuit; it has morphed into a spectacle for public consumption, largely facilitated by the omnipresent influence of social media. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok encourage, if not demand, the public exhibition of happiness. The public sphere, once a refuge for emotional complexity, is now overtaken by the relentless need to perform happiness in the digital realm. This shift transforms happiness into a performative act, with the pressure to appear joyful in public spaces becoming a central feature of contemporary life. In this hyperconnected digital age, happiness is no longer something to be quietly experienced but something to be broadcast, curated, and consumed by others.
Social media enforces a new kind of emotional regulation: the performance of joy and fulfillment. Every vacation, every career achievement, every meal shared with friends must be documented, filtered, and presented as evidence of a happy, successful life. Happiness, in this context, becomes a currency of social capital. The more successfully one performs happiness online, the more validation one receives in the form of likes, shares, and comments, further reinforcing the notion that personal happiness must be public and visible.
This public exhibition of happiness contrasts starkly with the privatization of suffering. While happiness is splashed across screens for all to see, suffering becomes a lonely, solitary endeavor. Social media creates a stark divide between public and private emotional life. Personal struggles — grief, depression, anxiety — are often hidden from view, kept in the shadows to maintain the facade of a fulfilled life. The pressure to project happiness onto the world leads individuals to mask their pain, creating a culture in which emotional complexity is suppressed, and only the bright, polished surface of existence is allowed to be seen.
This wasn’t always the case. Historically, many cultures embraced public rituals of suffering, allowing individuals to express their pain and hardship in communal settings. Grief, mourning, and struggle were collective experiences, shared openly in the public domain, and ritualized through acts that brought communities together in recognition of their shared vulnerability.
For example, public mourning rituals were once a common practice in many societies. In ancient Greece, public lamentation — women wailing, tearing their clothes, and beating their chests — was a socially sanctioned and visible expression of sorrow during funerals. In many indigenous cultures, rites of passage often involved painful physical trials or spiritual journeys that symbolized the individual’s suffering as part of a communal experience. These rituals not only validated the emotional experience of the sufferer but also allowed society to witness, understand, and share in their pain.
Even in more recent history, religious practices such as Christian flagellation or public expressions of penance allowed individuals to experience and perform suffering publicly. Lent, a period of public fasting and deprivation, invited Christians to engage in a visible form of suffering that reflected communal participation in a shared spiritual endeavor. Likewise, in medieval Europe, flagellant movements saw individuals publicly whipping themselves to atone for sins, creating a spectacle of suffering that was at once personal and collective.
In contrast, today’s society has largely eliminated such communal, public expressions of suffering, favoring the opposite: a polished veneer of constant happiness. The shift toward the privatization of pain has accompanied the rise of neoliberal ideology, in which suffering is increasingly individualized and pathologized. In modern capitalist society, suffering is seen as a personal failure rather than a shared human condition. Individuals are expected to manage their emotional states privately, using the tools of self-care, therapy, or medication, while their public personas remain untainted by visible expressions of hardship.
Social media magnifies this dynamic, turning the pursuit of happiness into a spectacle that must be continuously performed and validated by others. Platforms like Instagram create a visual culture where moments of joy and success are highlighted, carefully edited, and publicly displayed, while moments of vulnerability or suffering are erased. The result is a kind of emotional distortion, where the messy, complex reality of life is reduced to a highlight reel of happiness. The constant exposure to these curated lives creates a feedback loop in which individuals feel pressured to live up to the unattainable ideal of perpetual joy.
This societal shift towards the public exhibition of happiness and the privatization of suffering reflects the broader pressures of neoliberal ideology. Happiness, in this context, is not only a personal achievement but a public obligation. As the super-ego compels individuals to enjoy, social media acts as the vehicle for this compulsion, constantly reminding users that they must not only experience happiness but perform it for the world to see. The platforms themselves become neoliberal apparatuses, reinforcing the idea that happiness is not a complex emotional state to be explored but a consumerist product to be displayed, purchased, and validated by others.
The disappearance of public rituals of suffering reflects a deeper loss in the social fabric. Where once suffering was acknowledged as part of the human experience and shared openly in communal rituals, it is now hidden, individualized, and treated as something to be fixed privately. The performance of happiness in public, coupled with the privatization of suffering, creates a culture of emotional isolation, where individuals feel disconnected from both their own pain and the collective acknowledgment of it.
The Elusive Nature of Happiness
While Eva Illouz critiques the neoliberal construction of happiness as a tool of control, Viktor Frankl offers an existential perspective that undermines the very notion that happiness can be consciously pursued. For Frankl, the search for happiness is inherently self-defeating. In his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl argues that happiness cannot be pursued directly; it is not an object to be grasped or a state to be achieved through effort. Instead, happiness is a byproduct — a “side effect” of living a life in pursuit of meaning.
Frankl’s existential psychology offers a stark contrast to the neoliberal idea that happiness is something that can be attained through personal effort. According to Frankl, happiness emerges only when we focus on something greater than ourselves — when we are engaged in the pursuit of a higher goal or a meaningful project. The moment we make happiness the primary aim, it eludes us. This paradox directly challenges the neoliberal notion that happiness can be achieved through self-improvement, emotional regulation, or the accumulation of material wealth.
The existential critique of happiness as a direct pursuit finds resonance in Lacanian psychoanalysis as well, particularly in the concept of desire and the death drive. For Lacan, desire is a central aspect of human experience, but it is never fully satisfied. Desire, in Lacan’s view, is not something we can extinguish or fulfill; it is a perpetual lack, an emptiness that drives us forward but can never be completely filled.
In the neoliberal discourse, happiness is often framed as something that can be pursued and attained through conscious effort, much like one might achieve financial success or personal goals. Positive psychology, with its emphasis on emotional regulation and personal responsibility, encourages individuals to believe that they can know exactly what they want and that happiness is a goal that can be reached through self-discipline and effort. But Lacanian psychoanalysis challenges this idea, suggesting that our desires are far more complex and driven by unconscious forces that we can never fully understand or control.
For Lacan, our desires are structured around a fundamental lack, an emptiness that can never be satisfied. We are driven not by the pursuit of happiness or fulfillment, but by the need to maintain this lack. This is why, according to Lacan, we often desire things that undermine our happiness or lead to self-sabotage. We are not rational actors pursuing our best interests, as behavioral economists or neoliberal ideologues might suggest; instead, we are subjects of desire, driven by unconscious forces that lead us to repeat the same patterns of behavior, even when they are destructive or unfulfilling.
Freud’s concept of the death drive — an unconscious compulsion towards repetition, self-sabotage, and destruction — offers a profound insight into why people continue to engage in behaviors that do not lead to happiness, despite their best intentions. In the context of neoliberal capitalism, this death drive manifests in the compulsive pursuit of consumption, status, and personal success. We are trapped in a cycle of desire that is never satisfied, and capitalism feeds this cycle by constantly generating new needs and new desires. The more we try to fill this gap, the more the system offers us solutions — products, experiences, self-help techniques — that promise fulfillment but never truly deliver.
This is the fundamental fantasy of neoliberal capitalism: the belief that we can know what we want and that we can achieve it through consumption and self-improvement. But from a Lacanian perspective, this fantasy only deepens our sense of lack. The more we consume, the more we are reminded of what we lack, and the cycle of desire continues.
This critique of desire directly challenges one of the foundational assumptions of neoliberal economics: that individuals act in their own rational self-interest. Behavioral economics, particularly in its more right-wing manifestations, assumes that if people simply pursue their own self-interest, the invisible hand of the market will ensure that collective well-being is achieved. But from a Lacanian perspective, this assumption is deeply flawed. We do not act in our self-interest; we constantly sabotage ourselves, driven by unconscious desires that lead us away from rationality.
Lacan’s psychoanalysis suggests that we are not masters of our own desires, and we cannot simply pursue happiness or self-interest in a straightforward way. Our actions are shaped by unconscious forces that lead us to repeat the same patterns of behavior, even when they are harmful or counterproductive. This understanding of human nature stands in stark contrast to the neoliberal view of individuals as rational actors who can control their emotions, regulate their desires, and achieve happiness through effort and discipline.
The Complexity of Happiness
Moreover, happiness itself is not a coherent, self-consistent category. It is a vague term that encompasses a wide range of experiences, many of which are mutually contradictory. Positive psychology often presents happiness as a simple, unambiguous state of well-being, but in reality, it is far more complex. Anger, for example, can drive social change and fuel movements for justice. Sadness, too, can lead to reflection and personal growth. These so-called “negative” emotions play a crucial role in human life and cannot be dismissed as mere obstacles to happiness. In this sense, happiness should not be the goal of life. Instead, positive emotions might be better understood as a form of “surplus-enjoyment,” a psychoanalytic term for the fleeting pleasures that arise as a byproduct of pursuing something else.
From Eva Illouz’s critique of positive psychology to Viktor Frankl’s existential challenge to the pursuit of happiness, and Lacan’s psychoanalytic understanding of desire, a common thread emerges: happiness is not something that can be pursued directly, nor is it a simple, straightforward goal. The neoliberal ideology of happiness, which frames it as a personal achievement attainable through effort and self-regulation, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature.
In reality, our desires are far more complicated than neoliberal capitalism would have us believe. We are driven by unconscious forces that often lead us away from happiness, and the more we try to fill the gap of desire through consumption and self-improvement, the more elusive happiness becomes. Capitalism, with its endless promises of fulfillment, exploits this dynamic by generating new desires and new forms of dissatisfaction, keeping us trapped in a cycle of consumption that never truly satisfies.
In the end, happiness is not something to be attained but something that may arise as a byproduct of living a meaningful life. It is not a goal to be pursued but a fleeting moment of joy that emerges from the complexities of human experience. To reduce happiness to a personal project, as neoliberal ideology does, is to misunderstand the true nature of human desire and to ignore the deeper, more meaningful aspects of life.
