Summary:
During my first few years in the US, it always stuck me as odd that everyone I met would break into an immediate smile and a greeting. Growing up in India, no one was expected to chat up strangers. In the US, it would take me some time to engage in a conversation before I realized my greeter had already passed me by. It took me some time to figure out the social rules and not stick out like a sore thumb. The book is about how the constant effort to project a happy facade in front of others is having a deleterious effect on happiness in the US. The author analyzes these efforts from different perspectives. She concludes that focusing on shared instead of individual responsibility and participating in social activities with family, friends and neighbors does more wonders for personal happiness than spending money on books and classes to achieve the same result. The book is written from the perspective of an immigrant and as such, there are also a lot of situations that strike a chord.
The insistence on a sunny disposition in America is tied into their self-conception as a nation - after all, US constitution is big on Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Life and Liberty have taken a back seat to the single minded pursuit of happiness as reflected in the comparative size of self help and liberty aisles in book stores. The pursuit of happiness as an individual goal has resulted in a boom of smartphone apps that allow people to monitor their efforts towards achieving that goal. The recurrent theme in the book is about the single minded pursuit of happiness, achieved by staying away from any hint of negative sentiment. The happiness movement also has its own distinct vocabulary: empowerment, mindfulness etc.,. The fetish of meritocracy in the US, that if people put in enough effort and commit themselves to yoga classes and mindfulness workshops, happiness can be achieved, extends into the pursuit of happiness as well. This is in spite of academic research showing that the more happiness gets defined as an explicit goal, the less happy people are with their lives. The General Social Survey, a survey across the US from 1970's has shown that Americans now are no less happier than they were in early 1970's, yoga classes and meditation notwithstanding. The insistence on pursuing happiness as an individual goal in the US has pushed socializing and community activities to the bottom of the priority list. The same General Social Survey concluded that less than one third of Americans socialized with their neighbors in 2008, down from half in 1974.
Analysis:
Happiness craze in the US starts from childhood - pushed by parents through techniques like attachment parenting. That technique calls for ensuring happiness and security of children by keeping them attached physically to the parent (usually the mother) for as long as possible. It looks upon letting children cry excessively as a means of causing long term emotional damage to the child. Because the parent is physically tethered to the child, they are expected to prevent excessive crying at all costs. This leads attachment parents in US to co-sleep with their kids and breast feed them for a much longer time than other developed countries. Attachment parenting also calls for maximizing every happiness opportunity for the child, no matter how tiny it happens to be. It has shown up in day care practices as well where the curriculum is stuffed with enrichment classes for toddlers and babies (that it is a steady revenue stream for them is a pretty good motivation as well). Day care providers and parents have resorted to smoothing out any negative feedback to prevent hurting their children's emotional well-being(an example provided by the author is her kids' daycare insistence on reframing 'lack of skills' in the report card as 'self-directing towards lower skill levels'). The parenting attitudes in US is part of a broad transformation towards physically and psychologically protecting their kids from any kind of negative experience. This has elevated stress levels among parents as they try to thoroughly sanitize the physical and psychological environments their kids grow up in. It has impacted kids as they grow older, as the kids find it tougher to cope up with a variety of life situations. The author points to extensive social segregation among American families as one significant reason - as funding for public schools (that serve as petri dish for social interactions in other countries) dries up, the tendency to gather in clusters based on social status is far more pronounced in US than other developed countries. The behaviors within that social cluster then get boiled down to a list of codes which are enforced zealously. With the spread of free market orthodoxy in US, government has reduced its investments in public goods for the society leaving corporations to step in to the void with their child care theories, classes, books and websites. As a result, parents keep flitting from one parenting philosophy to another while constantly doubting their ability to prepare their kids for the future. Research has shown that average anxiety levels among high school kids in US currently is as high as an average psychiatric patient in the 1950's. Parents in US also firmly believe that child rearing should be its own reward in spite of multiple studies showing the negative effects of children on parents' personal happiness levels. The pernicious myth of individual responsibility has meant that parents blame themselves when their kids do not turn out to be as successful as they expected their children to be. Research has also shown that parents in countries with stronger social safety nets and welfare spending are much happier on an average than countries with weaker social safety nets and welfare spending (of which US is an example).
Social media has made the search for happiness worse. People put out a sanitized version of themselves that bears very little resemblance to their actual selves. Research has shown that moment to moment happiness and overall life happiness is lower for heavy social media users (which considering the single minded focus on getting the most amount of likes is not surprising). Social media forces people to constantly benchmark themselves against their peers. Because people only share positive and uplifting moments on their social media feed, the treadmill effect of constant comparison leaves the average social media user more sad than happy. Research has come up a name for this phenomenon called envy spiral (replacing the older Keeping up with the Joneses from the pre-social media world) whereby people enhance their profiles with more glitz in reaction to other posts in their social media circle. Some websites have leveraged this phenomenon by explicitly serving up only positive stories - an example would be the site Upworthy. The consequence has been stories that spread quickly in social media but have been scrubbed of their nuance and context - something that might explain how Russians might have manipulated another similar emotion, fear to spread false stories prior to 2016 US Presidential election.
The focus on happiness (or positive psychology) has also extended into academia which has expended great efforts in analyzing its causes and effects. American Psychological Association under one of its past presidents - Dr. Martin Seligman kicked off the raft of academic studies on positive psychology in 1998. He was primarily known for his studies on learned helplessness by administering electric shocks on captive dogs - something that was used very effectively by CIA in its torture at Abu Ghraib and other sites and that was highlighted by the damning Senate report on the culpability of APA in devising those torture techniques. Positive psychology research was primarily directed at analyzing happiness, its causes and effects. They are primarily funded by John Templeton Foundation and have spread across colleges and universities in the US. The research has been instrumental in developing courses that, in turn, has allowed a multitude of companies to rake in profits. The underlying assumption behind these courses is that happiness is an individual choice and life circumstances have a minimal impact on one's happiness. It rose out of original research that pinpointed 3 factors in determining a person's happiness - genetics, life circumstances and their voluntary contribution (personal efforts). While the original research allocated 50% of a person's happiness to genetics, 30 - 40% to life circumstances and 10 - 20% to voluntary contributions, recent happiness studies have exaggerated the effect of voluntary contributions and minimized the effect of life circumstances. Considering the underlying philosophy of John Templeton foundation (right wing conservatives holding up individual responsibility as the lodestar for cultural, political and economic change), this shift is not surprising. By exaggerating the influence of a person's voluntary contribution to their happiness, academia has been able to sell more books and classes even though the end results have been abysmal for the paying public. The author demonstrates this with the example of the best selling book The How of Happiness by Dr.Sonja Lyubomorski. The author tries to track down references in a gratitude exercise that Dr.Sonja trumpets as increasing personal happiness and comes to the conclusion that the study was never published and peer reviewed even though Dr. Sonja pitches it as a scientific study in her book. Researchers of positive psychology stand to gain financially from a certain outcome of the trial or study that skews the results of that trial or study. This is similar to studies and trials in pharmaceutical industry which is why double blind testing is usually considered to be the gold standard. A meta analysis of studies involving positive psychology has debunked most of the popular claims made by these researchers. However, the damage has already been done with several countries instituting Happiness Index (example would be National Happiness Index in UK) to measure happiness levels of their citizens. The irony of these efforts is that these countries are cutting down social safety nets and welfare spending at the same time they are promoting Happiness Index showing how bogus research can influence public policy in dangerous ways.
Meditation has been pitched as a way for Americans to reduce their anxiety and reach their happiness goal. The underlying assumption of happiness being an individual pursuit has meant even meditation and yoga classes feature minimal amount of social interactions. With lack of meaningful human connections, even meditation sessions fail at delivering happiness. Research has shown that expanding one's social circle is a surefire way to achieve happiness. On the other hand, neglecting social relationships can be detrimental to mental health. The individualistic approach does provide hefty profits to people hawking their solutions with very little benefits to the consumers. Happiness programs run by companies have replaced confidants and communities in the US. Landmark Forum made $84 million a year followed by Dr. Phil McGraw who made around $70 million a year. To get a feel for these happiness programs, the author describes her experiences with Landmark program, that charges hefty fees for its happiness courses. The program aims to teach people to differentiate between fact and interpretation when it comes to self narratives about events in their lives. Their approach to achieving that aim is by bullying the participants into denying unhappy events that took place in their life and accentuating the positive events. To ensure people come back for future classes, the instructors at Landmark Forum market offer discounts and promotions for future attendance. This approach of happiness as a choice unites disparate happiness hawkers like Tony Robbins and Landmark Forum. The author also tries her hand at other programs like Challenge Day, a volunteering program started by alumni of Landmark program that now conducts mandatory happiness training across a lot of public schools. Challenge Day aims to inculcate happiness among kids by portraying it as an individual choice instead of focusing on systemic issues like racism, poverty, family abuse etc.,. They aim to show the students that their peers are also in a similar situation and that they are not alone. However, their methodology of putting students on the spot has unintended consequences - there has been an increase in use of force or violence in schools after
Challenge Day program has been implemented in those schools.
The pursuit of happiness has also been foisted on employees and workers by corporations as a means of improving their bottom line. Companies are cutting down employee benefits and collective bargaining rights for their employees while pushing them towards mandatory wellness and happiness programs. Some have taken these programs a step further by having their employees wear happiness monitors. The author takes a look at Zappos, a company that has made turning work into fun its corporate mantra. By consistently blurring the line between work and life (even going to the extent of denying that there is such a thing as work life balance), Zappos aims to focus energy of its employees into maximizing its profit. The company's founder Tony Hsieh is known for his extremely positive approach (that involves completely blocking any type of negativity). Zappos places a premium on 'Positivity', by actively quashing any negative thoughts even if they are valid. Prospective candidates to Zappos are evaluated based on the question, 'Would I want to go grab a drink with this person ?' - Something that has echoes of current day political analysis about likability of presidential candidates explaining how George W Bush, Donald Trump and Barack Obama won their elections because average Americans perceived them to be good drinking buddies. In Zappos, employees are encouraged to think of themselves as a family, supplanting their actual families. The open office layout also encourages the fallacy of everyone working together as a family even though the power differential between Tony Hsieh and his employees is reality undercuts the family dynamic (after all, each employee is evaluated by Tony Hsieh whether he would like to go grab a drink with them and not the other way around). Tony Hsieh has used his wealth to develop a residential community called the Downtown project near Las Vegas which applies the same Positivity principles of Zappos to a community. He invited a diverse set of people - entrepreneurs, workers to live in his downtown project. Their continued presence in the project is evaluated by the same criteria that Tony Hsieh used at Zappos - 'Would I want to go grab a drink with this person ?'. They had to leave their family and friends behind and live and socialize with their colleagues in the downtown project all the time. The constant vigilance needed to maintain a positive outlook on life and lack of understanding for any kind of negative experience has resulted in a spike in the number of suicides. Since happiness was considered to be the be all and end all of downtown project, people who were unhappy or depressed were actively shunned. With no mental health support to cope with their loneliness and depression, some of them took their own lives. While Zappos represents one extreme, technology behemoths like Facebook, Google, Apple are only slightly less extreme when it comes to leveraging employee happiness for company bottom line. Similar to Zappos, these technology companies make a public spectacle of their C suite officers working in the same open floor as the rest of the employees. They also provide a whole host of wellness benefits like treadmill desks, free food, inspirational slogans with a very clear expectation that the employees devote themselves wholeheartedly to the company's bottom line. Well paid white collar workers in US tend to work much longer hours (at work and home) while low wage part time workers (so designated that the company can get away with skimping on a whole host of employee protections) try to scrounge up as much as they can to earn a decent living. There is a positive correlation between companies that beat the drum for wellness and happiness offerings for their employees and those that most aggressively counter union and collective bargaining efforts among their employees (examples include Bank of America, IBM, Starbucks).
Religious people have been shown to have higher levels of happiness than non religious people. Religious people are more likely to give charity, do volunteer service, help the homeless, donate blood, help out others and spend time with someone who is depressed. Because religion provides its adherents with a community and structured set of social activities, religious people navigate life much happier than non religious people (for whom both the community and activities have to come through their individual efforts). The author provides the example of Utah as an example as a state that is an exception when it comes to social mobility in US. While US has some of the lowest rates of social mobility in developed world, Utah (and its capital Salt Lake City), have the highest - primarily owing to the efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in laying out a strict set of social codes in return for providing generous social safety net and welfare system.
Other Books for Reference:
Bright Sided! How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America - Barbara Ehrenreich
Hand to Mouth, Living in Bootstrap America - Linda Tirado
During my first few years in the US, it always stuck me as odd that everyone I met would break into an immediate smile and a greeting. Growing up in India, no one was expected to chat up strangers. In the US, it would take me some time to engage in a conversation before I realized my greeter had already passed me by. It took me some time to figure out the social rules and not stick out like a sore thumb. The book is about how the constant effort to project a happy facade in front of others is having a deleterious effect on happiness in the US. The author analyzes these efforts from different perspectives. She concludes that focusing on shared instead of individual responsibility and participating in social activities with family, friends and neighbors does more wonders for personal happiness than spending money on books and classes to achieve the same result. The book is written from the perspective of an immigrant and as such, there are also a lot of situations that strike a chord.
The insistence on a sunny disposition in America is tied into their self-conception as a nation - after all, US constitution is big on Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Life and Liberty have taken a back seat to the single minded pursuit of happiness as reflected in the comparative size of self help and liberty aisles in book stores. The pursuit of happiness as an individual goal has resulted in a boom of smartphone apps that allow people to monitor their efforts towards achieving that goal. The recurrent theme in the book is about the single minded pursuit of happiness, achieved by staying away from any hint of negative sentiment. The happiness movement also has its own distinct vocabulary: empowerment, mindfulness etc.,. The fetish of meritocracy in the US, that if people put in enough effort and commit themselves to yoga classes and mindfulness workshops, happiness can be achieved, extends into the pursuit of happiness as well. This is in spite of academic research showing that the more happiness gets defined as an explicit goal, the less happy people are with their lives. The General Social Survey, a survey across the US from 1970's has shown that Americans now are no less happier than they were in early 1970's, yoga classes and meditation notwithstanding. The insistence on pursuing happiness as an individual goal in the US has pushed socializing and community activities to the bottom of the priority list. The same General Social Survey concluded that less than one third of Americans socialized with their neighbors in 2008, down from half in 1974.
Analysis:
Happiness craze in the US starts from childhood - pushed by parents through techniques like attachment parenting. That technique calls for ensuring happiness and security of children by keeping them attached physically to the parent (usually the mother) for as long as possible. It looks upon letting children cry excessively as a means of causing long term emotional damage to the child. Because the parent is physically tethered to the child, they are expected to prevent excessive crying at all costs. This leads attachment parents in US to co-sleep with their kids and breast feed them for a much longer time than other developed countries. Attachment parenting also calls for maximizing every happiness opportunity for the child, no matter how tiny it happens to be. It has shown up in day care practices as well where the curriculum is stuffed with enrichment classes for toddlers and babies (that it is a steady revenue stream for them is a pretty good motivation as well). Day care providers and parents have resorted to smoothing out any negative feedback to prevent hurting their children's emotional well-being(an example provided by the author is her kids' daycare insistence on reframing 'lack of skills' in the report card as 'self-directing towards lower skill levels'). The parenting attitudes in US is part of a broad transformation towards physically and psychologically protecting their kids from any kind of negative experience. This has elevated stress levels among parents as they try to thoroughly sanitize the physical and psychological environments their kids grow up in. It has impacted kids as they grow older, as the kids find it tougher to cope up with a variety of life situations. The author points to extensive social segregation among American families as one significant reason - as funding for public schools (that serve as petri dish for social interactions in other countries) dries up, the tendency to gather in clusters based on social status is far more pronounced in US than other developed countries. The behaviors within that social cluster then get boiled down to a list of codes which are enforced zealously. With the spread of free market orthodoxy in US, government has reduced its investments in public goods for the society leaving corporations to step in to the void with their child care theories, classes, books and websites. As a result, parents keep flitting from one parenting philosophy to another while constantly doubting their ability to prepare their kids for the future. Research has shown that average anxiety levels among high school kids in US currently is as high as an average psychiatric patient in the 1950's. Parents in US also firmly believe that child rearing should be its own reward in spite of multiple studies showing the negative effects of children on parents' personal happiness levels. The pernicious myth of individual responsibility has meant that parents blame themselves when their kids do not turn out to be as successful as they expected their children to be. Research has also shown that parents in countries with stronger social safety nets and welfare spending are much happier on an average than countries with weaker social safety nets and welfare spending (of which US is an example).
Social media has made the search for happiness worse. People put out a sanitized version of themselves that bears very little resemblance to their actual selves. Research has shown that moment to moment happiness and overall life happiness is lower for heavy social media users (which considering the single minded focus on getting the most amount of likes is not surprising). Social media forces people to constantly benchmark themselves against their peers. Because people only share positive and uplifting moments on their social media feed, the treadmill effect of constant comparison leaves the average social media user more sad than happy. Research has come up a name for this phenomenon called envy spiral (replacing the older Keeping up with the Joneses from the pre-social media world) whereby people enhance their profiles with more glitz in reaction to other posts in their social media circle. Some websites have leveraged this phenomenon by explicitly serving up only positive stories - an example would be the site Upworthy. The consequence has been stories that spread quickly in social media but have been scrubbed of their nuance and context - something that might explain how Russians might have manipulated another similar emotion, fear to spread false stories prior to 2016 US Presidential election.
The focus on happiness (or positive psychology) has also extended into academia which has expended great efforts in analyzing its causes and effects. American Psychological Association under one of its past presidents - Dr. Martin Seligman kicked off the raft of academic studies on positive psychology in 1998. He was primarily known for his studies on learned helplessness by administering electric shocks on captive dogs - something that was used very effectively by CIA in its torture at Abu Ghraib and other sites and that was highlighted by the damning Senate report on the culpability of APA in devising those torture techniques. Positive psychology research was primarily directed at analyzing happiness, its causes and effects. They are primarily funded by John Templeton Foundation and have spread across colleges and universities in the US. The research has been instrumental in developing courses that, in turn, has allowed a multitude of companies to rake in profits. The underlying assumption behind these courses is that happiness is an individual choice and life circumstances have a minimal impact on one's happiness. It rose out of original research that pinpointed 3 factors in determining a person's happiness - genetics, life circumstances and their voluntary contribution (personal efforts). While the original research allocated 50% of a person's happiness to genetics, 30 - 40% to life circumstances and 10 - 20% to voluntary contributions, recent happiness studies have exaggerated the effect of voluntary contributions and minimized the effect of life circumstances. Considering the underlying philosophy of John Templeton foundation (right wing conservatives holding up individual responsibility as the lodestar for cultural, political and economic change), this shift is not surprising. By exaggerating the influence of a person's voluntary contribution to their happiness, academia has been able to sell more books and classes even though the end results have been abysmal for the paying public. The author demonstrates this with the example of the best selling book The How of Happiness by Dr.Sonja Lyubomorski. The author tries to track down references in a gratitude exercise that Dr.Sonja trumpets as increasing personal happiness and comes to the conclusion that the study was never published and peer reviewed even though Dr. Sonja pitches it as a scientific study in her book. Researchers of positive psychology stand to gain financially from a certain outcome of the trial or study that skews the results of that trial or study. This is similar to studies and trials in pharmaceutical industry which is why double blind testing is usually considered to be the gold standard. A meta analysis of studies involving positive psychology has debunked most of the popular claims made by these researchers. However, the damage has already been done with several countries instituting Happiness Index (example would be National Happiness Index in UK) to measure happiness levels of their citizens. The irony of these efforts is that these countries are cutting down social safety nets and welfare spending at the same time they are promoting Happiness Index showing how bogus research can influence public policy in dangerous ways.
Meditation has been pitched as a way for Americans to reduce their anxiety and reach their happiness goal. The underlying assumption of happiness being an individual pursuit has meant even meditation and yoga classes feature minimal amount of social interactions. With lack of meaningful human connections, even meditation sessions fail at delivering happiness. Research has shown that expanding one's social circle is a surefire way to achieve happiness. On the other hand, neglecting social relationships can be detrimental to mental health. The individualistic approach does provide hefty profits to people hawking their solutions with very little benefits to the consumers. Happiness programs run by companies have replaced confidants and communities in the US. Landmark Forum made $84 million a year followed by Dr. Phil McGraw who made around $70 million a year. To get a feel for these happiness programs, the author describes her experiences with Landmark program, that charges hefty fees for its happiness courses. The program aims to teach people to differentiate between fact and interpretation when it comes to self narratives about events in their lives. Their approach to achieving that aim is by bullying the participants into denying unhappy events that took place in their life and accentuating the positive events. To ensure people come back for future classes, the instructors at Landmark Forum market offer discounts and promotions for future attendance. This approach of happiness as a choice unites disparate happiness hawkers like Tony Robbins and Landmark Forum. The author also tries her hand at other programs like Challenge Day, a volunteering program started by alumni of Landmark program that now conducts mandatory happiness training across a lot of public schools. Challenge Day aims to inculcate happiness among kids by portraying it as an individual choice instead of focusing on systemic issues like racism, poverty, family abuse etc.,. They aim to show the students that their peers are also in a similar situation and that they are not alone. However, their methodology of putting students on the spot has unintended consequences - there has been an increase in use of force or violence in schools after
Challenge Day program has been implemented in those schools.
The pursuit of happiness has also been foisted on employees and workers by corporations as a means of improving their bottom line. Companies are cutting down employee benefits and collective bargaining rights for their employees while pushing them towards mandatory wellness and happiness programs. Some have taken these programs a step further by having their employees wear happiness monitors. The author takes a look at Zappos, a company that has made turning work into fun its corporate mantra. By consistently blurring the line between work and life (even going to the extent of denying that there is such a thing as work life balance), Zappos aims to focus energy of its employees into maximizing its profit. The company's founder Tony Hsieh is known for his extremely positive approach (that involves completely blocking any type of negativity). Zappos places a premium on 'Positivity', by actively quashing any negative thoughts even if they are valid. Prospective candidates to Zappos are evaluated based on the question, 'Would I want to go grab a drink with this person ?' - Something that has echoes of current day political analysis about likability of presidential candidates explaining how George W Bush, Donald Trump and Barack Obama won their elections because average Americans perceived them to be good drinking buddies. In Zappos, employees are encouraged to think of themselves as a family, supplanting their actual families. The open office layout also encourages the fallacy of everyone working together as a family even though the power differential between Tony Hsieh and his employees is reality undercuts the family dynamic (after all, each employee is evaluated by Tony Hsieh whether he would like to go grab a drink with them and not the other way around). Tony Hsieh has used his wealth to develop a residential community called the Downtown project near Las Vegas which applies the same Positivity principles of Zappos to a community. He invited a diverse set of people - entrepreneurs, workers to live in his downtown project. Their continued presence in the project is evaluated by the same criteria that Tony Hsieh used at Zappos - 'Would I want to go grab a drink with this person ?'. They had to leave their family and friends behind and live and socialize with their colleagues in the downtown project all the time. The constant vigilance needed to maintain a positive outlook on life and lack of understanding for any kind of negative experience has resulted in a spike in the number of suicides. Since happiness was considered to be the be all and end all of downtown project, people who were unhappy or depressed were actively shunned. With no mental health support to cope with their loneliness and depression, some of them took their own lives. While Zappos represents one extreme, technology behemoths like Facebook, Google, Apple are only slightly less extreme when it comes to leveraging employee happiness for company bottom line. Similar to Zappos, these technology companies make a public spectacle of their C suite officers working in the same open floor as the rest of the employees. They also provide a whole host of wellness benefits like treadmill desks, free food, inspirational slogans with a very clear expectation that the employees devote themselves wholeheartedly to the company's bottom line. Well paid white collar workers in US tend to work much longer hours (at work and home) while low wage part time workers (so designated that the company can get away with skimping on a whole host of employee protections) try to scrounge up as much as they can to earn a decent living. There is a positive correlation between companies that beat the drum for wellness and happiness offerings for their employees and those that most aggressively counter union and collective bargaining efforts among their employees (examples include Bank of America, IBM, Starbucks).
Religious people have been shown to have higher levels of happiness than non religious people. Religious people are more likely to give charity, do volunteer service, help the homeless, donate blood, help out others and spend time with someone who is depressed. Because religion provides its adherents with a community and structured set of social activities, religious people navigate life much happier than non religious people (for whom both the community and activities have to come through their individual efforts). The author provides the example of Utah as an example as a state that is an exception when it comes to social mobility in US. While US has some of the lowest rates of social mobility in developed world, Utah (and its capital Salt Lake City), have the highest - primarily owing to the efforts of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints in laying out a strict set of social codes in return for providing generous social safety net and welfare system.
Other Books for Reference:
Bright Sided! How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America - Barbara Ehrenreich
Hand to Mouth, Living in Bootstrap America - Linda Tirado
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