EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN SELIGMAN IN PSYCHOLOGIES NOW QUESTIONS THE ‘HAPPINESS INDEX’ AND HAPPINESS MOVEMENT

This month the Government will interview 200,000 families across the UK in an attempt to gauge how happy we are as a nation.

David Cameron has already attracted a barrage of criticism for the idea. Now, one of the men who originally inspired the happiness movement has dubbed much of the world’s focus on feeling good as nothing more than ‘happyology’.

American happiness guru Martin Seligman, who invented the whole concept of ‘positive psychology’, has now admitted in an interview in this month’s (May issue out Today – 6th April) Psychologies magazine that he now believes people want more in life than mere happiness.

“What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice, they want meaning. An interesting example is that there’s quite a bit of evidence that people’s mood isn’t as good once they have children. If that’s all people were interested in, we should have been extinguished a long time ago.’

Despite writing internationally renowned books, ‘Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment’ and ‘Can Happiness be Taught?’,  Seligman now believes that the word ‘happiness’ has become so overused that it has becoming meaningless.

‘The word happiness always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it’s subjective.’

Instead, he suggests we focus on ‘flourishing’, his big new idea that encompases a wider definition of feeling good. In the interview he also addresses the issue of whether
governments could be doing more harm than good by measuring the mood of their populations, particularly with the forthcoming ‘Happiness Index’.