Joy in Precariousness: Backed by Science (self-selected text)
Reading "Four Fundamental Distinctions in Conceptions of well-being across culture" for my positive psychology class, I find myself struck by the sudden revelation of the idea of happiness from many schools of though from non-Western, collectivistic cultures, that states happiness should not be actively sought, and unhappiness shouldn't be avoided, rooted in the idea that beneath misery, or precariousness, happiness can be found (Joshanloo et al., 2021).
Apparently, this idea is insane for Western researchers, that live in contexts where the pursuit of happiness is the ultimate goal and a supreme value, evidenced in the abundance of wellness apps, programs and self-help books and cults. They tend to be challenged by the question: How can one find happiness in precarious circumstances, and what's the ultimate pursuit but finding one's personal happiness?
Collectivistic conceptions and predictors of well-being (used interchangeably with "happiness" in the research) are more related to engaging socially with others. These emotions are not related to hedonic emotions like pleasure, lack of pain, but to values connecting to meaning and transcendence with and through others. These include harmony, calmness, and maintaining a balance, embracing both pleasure and pain, coexisting with them while avoiding the extremes.
I can't help to think the source of these conception of happiness in collectivism contexts comes from the endurance of generations through extreme circumstances of violence, trauma and war, mostly inflicted and sponsored by Western actors, that have forced us to find joy in precariousness, and not despite it. Fear of happiness, or "happiness aversion", was also found prevalent across collectivistic countries, where beliefs such as " being happy makes it more likely that bad things will happen to you," and "expressing happiness is bad for you and others", guide people's behaviours and predict well-being in these contexts.
When reflecting on these findings, I think of intergenerational trauma, especially from immigrant families in their cultural Diasporas, where there's a lot of guilt and shame in feeling happy, in experiencing success, where impostor syndrome takes over first gen students and professionals, unable to understand these clashing feelings of personal pleasure and happiness in a culture that praises you for that, while also feeling the pressure of aligning strongly with your family and community's beliefs of balance and harmony and not feeling happy because that means it can be taken from you at any second.
These themes are important for my thesis work as I explore the re-appropriation of our self-conceptions as Latinxs through ideas of Latinx Futurisms, especially for those of us living in the Diaspora, experiencing constant clash of feelings, overlap in cultural beliefs of happiness, within our lived experiences with family and community, and in the Western, individualistic context we live in, where the pressure to assimilate into the strongly independent and pursuit-of-happiness oriented atmosphere is PALPABLE and almost have us by our throats.
I aim to resist to the pressures of assimilation and submission of our identities to the Western ideas of happiness that erase our ever-evolving self-conceptions and deem impossible our embracing of the in-betweenness, ambiguity that lives within us, our overlapping and intersecting identities, our constant contradictions, because we don't exist in a vacuum, and refuse to be understood through a linear, individualistic narrative or a Western gaze that limits the creation and invention of ourSELVES.
The significance of the conceptions of well-being/happiness in collectivistic cultures for my research lies in the idea of Latinx Futuristic works as creators of impossible/idealistic realities that allow us to re-appropriates our pre-colonial identities and self-conceptions, and experience our cultural, racial, ethnic and other intersecting identities in a constructed space where everything we have dreamed of is possible and can be experienced materially. In this iteration, I explore happiness/well-being as rest, as an impossible ideal for our Latinx realities in Abya Yala and in the Diaspora, a (distant) dream parallel to the idea of returning to our origins, our communities and our homelands, which in reality is seen as resistance. Through cultural conceptions of home and material culture, I aim to construct an ideal space for our Latinx identities to embody rest, joy, remembering and embracing our in-betweenness within cultural, geographical and racial borders, in a domestic space that brings us closer to home in the far distance, and in our physical realities, bringing us closer to each other in community.
I talk in terms of "ours" to you because I exist and contain my family, community and culture in me and our ideas, as well as generations of us, because our knowledge and ideas are conceived thanks to them and I exist alongside and together with them.
Bibliography
Joshanloo, M., Van de Vliert, E., & Jose, P. E. (2021). Four fundamental distinctions in conceptions of wellbeing across cultures. In The Palgrave Handbook of Positive Education (pp. 675-703). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
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