The Happiness Fantasy: Summary & Key Insights

To understand how neoliberalism colonized our imagination of happiness, we must begin with an earlier time when happiness meant something collective and publicly grounded. In Enlightenment thought—from thinkers like Bentham to Rousseau—happiness was bound up with reason, virtue, and humanity’s capacity to organize society toward the common good. The famous idea of 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number' was an ethical and political principle, not a private mood. In this world, happiness was a matter of justice, equality, and participation.

After the Second World War, this relationship between happiness and solidarity reached its most ambitious form in the social democratic welfare states. Happiness was seen as inseparable from material security and social care. Access to education, healthcare, housing, and cultural participation was part of an entire architecture of well-being. Happiness had institutions behind it. The marketplace did not define its conditions.

I revisit this historical moment because it helps us recognize what has been lost. There was no illusion that people could or should be happy all the time. Instead, the pursuit of happiness was sustained by collective responsibility and social hope—the sense that one’s own flourishing required that others flourish too. It is against this backdrop that the neoliberal revolution must be understood: not just as an economic shift, but as an emotional and moral one that changed what it meant to feel good, to live well, and even to be human.

With the neoliberal turn of the late twentieth century came a powerful redefinition of happiness. Markets, once external to the personal domain, began shaping every aspect of social life. The promise of freedom was reinterpreted as the freedom to choose oneself. The collective ideals of the previous era were recast as constraints on individuality. And so the meaning of happiness shifted from a shared goal to a private project.

This transformation was not merely economic; it was cultural and psychological. As the welfare state retreated, a new vocabulary entered our lives—efficiency, autonomy, self-responsibility. The old bonds of solidarity were replaced by networks of self-entrepreneurs, each responsible for their own emotional economy. In this new world, unhappiness could no longer be a sign of social dysfunction; it was a personal failure to adapt, to stay positive, to 'think differently.'

The neoliberal promise of happiness thus came tied to a moral imperative: to optimize, to manage oneself, to turn one’s own life into a marketable asset. From Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that 'there is no such thing as society' to Silicon Valley’s relentless optimism, this new happiness was about individual triumphs, not collective emancipation. And as such, it became one of the most effective ideological projects of our age.