Today I was looking at a book called Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side Of The New Happy Class.
It's written by a guy who thinks people are overdoing the following things: anti-depressants, alternative therapies, and exercise. These things are making them artificially happy, insulating them from authentic sadness. Sally Satel reviewed the book here and talked about the anti-depressant angle, about which I know little. I don't know much about alternative therapies, either.
But I did want to say something about the exercise angle. The author draws this weird distinction between success in real life and success in meeting one's exercise goals. He says, in effect, that the happiness of running your first 5k is somehow a non-real-world event, because it doesn't directly apply to one's work or one's family life.
Maybe his problem with such activity is that it's devoted to the self. Would it surprise you that this guy also wrote a book called The Rise of the Imperial Self: America's Culture Wars in Augustinian Perspective?
His complaint, I think, is the Puritan one -
People are having too much fun.
2 comments:
I'm with him on the anti-depressant; I don't think they're good for us.
*BUT* exercise??? That's where he loses me. We *need* exercise to be healthy people. And, bodies that grow healthy naturally (emotionally & physical) are happy bodies. :)
Yes, I'm still shaking my head over the exercise thing.
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