The critique feels valid to me. There’s a tendency in modern psychology/media to pathologize the average human baseline: if you’re not consistently optimistic and thriving, something must be wrong with you, or at least you need to be in a pursuit of this.
But constant happiness isn’t realistic, it’s like a desire to be permanently high. From my own experience I’ve landed somewhere near the Buddhist framing: the healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.
Trying to force happiness as a permanent state seems like its own problem, which is kind of what Bentall is pointing at from the other direction.
But constant happiness isn’t realistic, it’s like a desire to be permanently high. From my own experience I’ve landed somewhere near the Buddhist framing: the healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.
Trying to force happiness as a permanent state seems like its own problem, which is kind of what Bentall is pointing at from the other direction.