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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: The happiness fantasy offers people a template for how to live well today.
Chapter 3: The ideas underpinning the happiness fantasy have an unusual origin tale, beginning with Wilhelm Reich himself.
Chapter 4: The anti-authoritarian strains in Wilhelm Reich’s ideas resonated with mid-century Californian hipsters.
Chapter 5: In Big Sur, California, notions of free sexuality merged with drug-fueled mysticism there.
Chapter 6: The ideas behind the happiness fantasy were further advanced at the Esalen Institute by psychoanalyst Fritz Perls there.
Chapter 7: Werner Erhard blended the human potential movement’s ideas with a pronounced emphasis on material success overall.
Chapter 8: In his demanding training programs, Werner Erhard preached a creed of the all-powerful self.
Chapter 9: Erhard’s messages endure today, and their underlying logic can foster victim-blaming too.
Chapter 10: By the 1980s, the human potential movement’s radical politics gave way to a corporate-friendly mindset overall.
Chapter 11: In the late 1970s and 1980s, concepts from the human potential movement permeated corporate culture across the board.
Chapter 12: Merging the happiness fantasy with corporate culture is profoundly problematic and increasingly untenable for many.
Description
The Happiness Fantasy (2018) advances a provocative thesis, encapsulated in its title: our contemporary ideas about happiness amount to a fantasy that’s increasingly out of sync with reality and unable to deliver what it promises. By taking a whirlwind tour of the history of this fantasy, we can begin to see through its illusions.
Who Should Listen
- People who are interested in the countercultural movements and philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s
- People who are skeptical of self-help books and seminars
- People who are burned out by the invasion of work life into leisure time