#145: The Happiness Industry With William Davies

The Art of Manliness

Society & Culture, Education, Philosophy

4.7 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2015

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In the last decade or so, books, blogs, corporations, and even governments are putting more emphasis on the idea of happiness. On the surface, this sounds great, but our guest today argues that maybe this should give us some pause. William Davies is the author of The Happiness Industry, and makes the case that this focus on happiness may be more about dollar signs than our actual well-being.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	We're at McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.
0:18.3	So in the past 10 years, there's been this increasing emphasis on happiness.
0:21.7	There's tons of books written about it.
0:23.5	Blogs are dedicated to how to be happier.
0:26.3	On your even seeing corporations becoming interested in tracking the happiness and well-being
0:30.8	of their employees and instituting programs to increase their happiness, governments
0:35.4	are also getting in on the act, developing algorithms to track the happiness of their
0:40.6	citizens.
0:41.6	And on the surface, this sounds great, right?
0:43.4	That's awesome that companies and governments want us to be happy.
0:46.6	And my guest today on the podcast makes the nuanced case that maybe we should give
0:51.6	us some pause.
0:53.1	His name is William Davies.
0:54.4	He's the author of the book, The Happiness Industry, How the Government and Big Business
0:57.4	Sold us well-being.
0:59.1	And then the book, he gives us a history of tracking happiness, which began all the way
1:03.6	back in the 1780s and has advanced throughout the centuries to what we have today, where
1:08.2	you have devices that you can put on your brain that can actually track your mood moment
1:12.8	to moment.
1:13.8	And even devices that can change your mood, moment to moment.
1:17.5	While there's some benefits to that, it should give us some pause because what it's happening,
1:21.2	is that it's beginning to have the market encroach into areas of our life that we never
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Art of Manliness, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Art of Manliness and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.