Discussing New Happy by Stephanie Harrison
Rethinking happiness, Old Happy parenting, and the slippery slope of meaning
If you’d rather listen to the discussion, check out my YouTube video here. Haven’t read the book? Check out my review.
New Happy is a self-help style book that tackles the concept of happiness. The author, Stephanie Harrison, is known on social media for making simple visualizations to communicate ideas about happiness. In this book, she forms a new kind of philosophy around happiness and lays out ways the reader can change their mindset and their lives to be more happy.
The structure of the book is laid out really well. She starts by identifying and then debunking the current cultural beliefs about happiness, then she gives a new framework for happiness, and finally outlines ways to apply the new framework in your own personal situations.
I’d like to talk a little bit about the ideas she presents and then the ways in which I connected with them, and finally add a bit of critique to some information presented at the end of the book.
Core Misbeliefs
The book starts with the premise: Society tells us that happiness comes from achievement, perfection, and material gain, but research shows that these don’t actually make us happy.
So where do those ideals come from? The author identifies three “hidden forces” that shape these ideas of happiness. They are individualism, capitalism, and domination.
Also, now is probably a good time to point out that she’s definitely referring to “Western” cultural and pretty specifically American culture here, not that some of these things don’t apply elsewhere, but just bear that in mind.
Individualism, she says, is that idea that we are separate from others and better off for it. It emphasizes self-interest and disconnects us from our communities. Next is capitalism, which she is sure to highlight that she’s talking about unchecked capitalism and acknowledges that capitalism has still brought incredible improvements in the overall quality of life for most people. But nevertheless, capitalism has still contributed to inequality, endless consumerism, and the destruction of nature. Lastly, she highlights domination, which she describes as “someone’s humanity is ignored so another can achieve goals of pleasure, power, possessions, or popularity.”
All of these combine in to a mindset of: isolate yourself, work harder, and prove your worth.
And that is exactly the scenario most of us find ourselves in these days. We work incredibly hard to get education or training to get a job where we must constantly have to work hard to prove our “value” to the company or risk being let go. We work hard to curate social media or online images to gain followings or friendships. We don’t ask for help because it’s considered a sign of weakness, so we close ourselves off, thinking if we can just work a little harder on that side gig we’ll finally be worthy.
And all this she distills into three lies that we come to believe based on these invisible forces:
1. You’re not enough.
2. You’ll be happy when…
3. You’re on your own.
So all this is laid out right at the beginning of the book. I was pretty convinced to continue reading because I feel like she concisely explained some things I’ve been feeling for many years now, but hadn’t quite labeled myself. I spent my entire young adult life thinking all of these things, but especially #2. I often thought, “I’ll be happy once I get my college degree, and then a job, and then a better job, and so on.” I thought, very much #3, that I was on my own to do it. And, of course, constantly trying at these things, but seeming to fail, made me feel that I wasn’t enough.
So what’s the alternative?
Label it differently
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
The author counters with three truths to believe instead:
1. You are imperfect and you are good. You are enough.
2. Happiness does not exist in the future, only in the present.
3. A self needs other selves.
The book places a lot of emphasis on our connections with others, and that helping others is a huge source of happiness. The part I like that differs from the platitude-esque nature of this idea (that we’ve all definitely heard before) is that we should help people in a way that’s authentic to our own skills and wisdom. This is the part that really resonated with me. There are as many ways to help others or spread happiness to others as there are people, and this idea is uniquely new to me, where kindness is often presented in a self-sacrificial lens.
Moreover, the idea that our happiness can ripple out to others is an interesting one. There’s a discussion in the book about Maslow’s Hierarchy that relates to this. The notion that our happiness can make others happy may sound like: prioritize your happiness first, and then you can make others happy. And the author argues that’s exactly the mental trap that Maslow’s Hierarchy has caused.
For one, Maslow never conceived his needs as a hierarchy. That was created by other people later. He also admitted to leaving out something called “self-transcendence” which is going beyond yourself.
This sparked a lot of thought for me. I’ve previously found the idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy useful; it helped me realize that I was constantly pouring from an empty cup and constantly trying to please others. I agree that the hierarchy doesn’t really make a lot of sense because most of those needs do exist simultaneously, even if food and shelter are essential to survival. I do believe that whether we have our needs met is a huge driver of our behavior. But I also agree with what the author is saying, which is that, even in the most horrific times (like war or natural disaster), you can see people helping others. Ultimately, meeting our needs, does make it easier for us to help others, but it’s not a “wait for it to happen then do it” thing.
What to do instead?
So knowing these new truths, what do we do instead? The author says: discover who you are, and use your gifts to help others. Your happiness can change the world.
She identifies three types of gifts that all people have: humanity, talent, wisdom.
This part of the book was quite helpful. She has guided questions for you to explore what your gifts are in these categories and how you can use them. As a fan of journaling and self-reflection, this aspect of the book makes it incredibly worth reading.
Parenting in an Old Happy world
I want to talk a little about how these ideas relate to parenting. It’s not like this is really a parenting book, but as a parent to a young child I couldn’t help but see how these myths about happiness present in modern parenting practices.
Much of modern parenting culture hyper-focuses on the idea of teaching “independence” to children as early as possible. From the start, there’s pressure to “sleep train” your baby so they can sleep alone in a crib away from their parents all night. There’s pressure to use harsh discipline (and excessive rewards), essentially a form of domination, to overpower and shape behavior to our will. As the kids get older, they are pressure to succeed and achieve in order to perform in the economy under capitalism.
These things are hard to resist. They’re embedded so deeply; some of us doing what our parents did (and often pressured to because “we did it, and you turned out fine”). Even seeking comfort in a friend, you might receive unsolicited pressure to make your kid “tough it out” so they can be more independent. And most parents who want the best for their kids think, “it’s a competitive world out there, I have to make sure my kid is prepared.”
But in New Happy, the author makes an important distinction between what we conceive of as “independence” and autonomy. What we really want our kids to learn is autonomy—how to be an effective person within the society or group you are in, without excessive forces of “domination.” This principle is emphasized in some parenting processes like Montessori for example. A child who learns a skill to participate in the household, like putting away dishes or washing them (depending on the age), is eager to display the autonomy to do the task with skill in order to participate in family life.
This is a concept also presented in “Hunt, Gather, Parent” as a way rooted throughout human history. Ultimately, the New Happy truth #3 that selves need other selves is and always will be true. No human alive exists without the help and support of humans that currently lived or once lived. The knowledge created over human history, and the ways people contribute by being in the world. Cooperation is always at the root of human progress, and that is a far more important belief to guide parenting than teaching my child that she must do everything herself and be alone in the world.
I could talk a lot more about this subject. For now, I will say, if you feel like the concepts of New Happy resonate with you, and you’re interested in how to apply them as a parent, I have a few recommendations for you. Dr. Becky of “Good Inside” exemplifies many of these New Happy ideals: that all children are good inside, and how to help children cope with challenges and emotions in the present moment. She has a great Instagram account with quick tips, a super helpful book, and an online community with workshops. Any one of her resources alone is extremely helpful, and I think the parenting movement she is sparking is very much in line with the tenants of New Happy. I’d also recommend any of the work of Gabor Mate.
New Happy is really all about nourishing your relationship with others, both those close to you and your conceptualization of “others” out there. There are names for this style of parenting that focuses on the relationship with your child as key. Within those things is a lot of variability, so I tend not to subscribe to any one of these in specific, but attachment parenting, gentle parenting, positive discipline, and authoritative parenting are all in this area.
A big part of the New Happy movement's success will actually be in changing how we ourselves choose to live and breathe concepts of happiness. And I believe the truths that New Happy presents are a much better framework for how we think of children and, eventually, adults.
“The world is changed by your example, not your opinion.”
The slippery slope of “meaning”
In my own personal growth journey (read: tons of therapy), I discovered that I was chasing the wrong things, which are the same that she presents in the book: money, achievement, success. I was trying to be something that someone else thought I should be. So I turned my focus towards something else: meaning.
I thought I had to find what’s meaningful in the world and work really hard to do that instead. But many years later, stuck in the same place of depression and inadequacy, I had an epiphany. That I replaced my success state with something just as extreme (even if a little more noble). I still had to “do something great” to be valid. And that is the real flaw.
In the context of New Happy, I was still constantly working hard to try and prove myself, and I thought I couldn’t be happy until I was doing something meaningful. It was the same Old Happy lies underneath.
I found that I was just as unhappy chasing meaning as I was chasing achievement or wealth. Because I was doing just that: chasing. I was constantly chasing a finish line that can never be reached, yet I had decided was an essential place to reach to be valid in the world.
One of the core assertions of the book is that you are enough no matter what. This is a hard pill for many of us to swallow, of course as Stephanie also explains in the book, it’s because of the social and cultural messages we’ve received our entire life. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s enough for someone to just tell you that you’re enough to change your mindset. For me, I was told this many times in therapy, but it took some really key experiences for me to actually internalize it (and do I still sometimes waver in it? Absolutely.)
This is where my main critique of the book comes in. It does seem like the author expects us to hear the words “You’re enough as you are” and just believe it and that’s that. The last chapter of the book begins to get really heavy into the idea of “finding meaning” that I mentioned above, and I felt like it was starting to slide down the same slippery slope that I personally experienced.
I very much believe in her assertion that helping others, especially in our own authentic way, and in small ways, is a great path to happiness for everyone. But I did feel uncomfortable with the push towards doing things that are “meaningful” on a grander scale. There’s nothing wrong with it in theory, but I would think it’s very easy for people to pursue that and find themselves on the same treadmill of trying to validate themselves through it.
The word meaning itself is also somewhat problematic because meaning varies from person to person, but the author uses something more akin to Meaning to apply to things like climate change, social justice, etc. That gives the impression that the only way to do something meaningful is to participate in some larger cause. That can be meaningful to people, but that’s not the only definition of it.
In the end, I think it’s possible and okay for a person to live a happy life without having to participate in a capital M meaning goal. I would even venture to say, that if you use your gifts to help others, that it’s very possible you will contribute to something that makes the world a better place. All without the stress of having to serve some kind of higher goal, and you might even live a happier life along the way.
“No man chooses evil because it is evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
-Mary Wollstonecraft