ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the new patterns of emotional performance and social life emerging from the happiness imperative. Through an analysis of people’s accounts of their engagement with happiness and wellbeing practices I suggest that therapeutic and self-help discourses are creating a tension between self and others, and self and world. Individually experienced emotions and internal life are prioritised over and above social connections and relationships. This was evident in the way people people’s narrative accounts emphasised emotional containment, mastery and control. However, they also highlight the importance and value of social ties, which are potentially more stable and enduring sources of happiness and wellbeing. My analysis demonstrates how therapeutic and self-help practices are reducing personal relationships and social interactions to a simple emotional transaction; that is, they are increasingly evaluated in terms of their affective and therapeutic qualities. I conclude by suggesting that as researchers we need to acknowledge the individual importance of happiness as well as the stability and meaning that social relationships hold for individuals. In this way, we might be better placed to forge the types of social and political relationships that are more forgiving, accepting and supportive of negativity and suffering.
