Oliver Burkeman And The Happiness Industry
Image: Oliver Burkeman / Canongate Books
Text: Aidan Mac Guill
Five years ago the journalist Oliver Burkeman embarked on a mission, a mission that might sound about as enticing to some of us as a bout of gastroenteritis, but a mission nonetheless. He decided, through his weekly column in the Guardian newspaper, to explore the world of self-help books; taking a rational, reasonable, journalistic approach to an area not always synonymous with rationality or reason (or indeed reality).
“I think everyone on some level would like to be a bit more happy, or efficient, or achieve their goals,” he explains in a phone interview from New York, where he lives. “I very much doubt that most of these books are going to contain the answer to that, but there's a tiny little part of you that thinks: it would be fantastic if they did.”
“That was the idea, to sort the wheat from the chaff, knowing that there would be a very large amount of chaff,” he says.
What has emerged from the project is a book, Help! (modestly subtitled 'How To Become Slightly Happier And Get A Bit More Done'; modesty being another quality often foreign to the world of self-help). It is an insightful, remarkable account of what could slightly pretentiously be termed the modern condition; how the technological and societal changes of recent times have impacted on our psychology, and our age-old search for happiness. Also it's very funny.
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