The happiness rat race à la Facebook

In a quest for greater rationality, the societal patterns – the way society is structured and its ordering to minimise entropy – have been evolving over a period of time and striving for greater internal consistencies among its constituents in an overarching framework. From the economic turmoil of the so called Great Depression to the rise of socio-economic neo-liberalism and continuing through the current confusing trends of glocalization is the march of capitalist hegemony, which in a Gramscian sense is seen both as legitimate and non-contestable. India has been witnessing it in the more easily identifiable names of the World Bank sponsored ‘Good Governance’ and ‘Reforms’.

            The agenda, in the ultimate analysis, which seeks to monetise and commodify everything has got so ingrained in the psyche of the ‘modern (wo)man’ that it is hard for him/her to think beyond the ontology of numbers. Everything has a number associated with it which characterises the essence of it – the ‘package’ of a potential spouse, how costly your mobile phone is, how big a car/house someone has or even how ‘beautiful’ his/her partner is!

            This obsession with numbers tends to deemphasise the substantive and intrinsic aspects of a thing, emotion or value and tends to highlight the economics of it. This economisation brings with it an inherent tendency to compare your numbers with my numbers and with everyone else’s numbers, since the basic philosophy of numbers is that one is less than two which in turn is less than three and so on. This gives rise to feelings of superiority/inferiority depending upon which side of the numbers you find yourself to be. A person’s worth is reduced to his ‘net worth’ in the process.

            Off late I have noticed some not so ‘smart’ people clicking pictures on their ‘smart’ phones here, there and everywhere. They do it in different poses, with different people and in all shapes and colours. I had a sudden epiphany after watching a group of girls clicking pictures – “Okay.. now they will upload these pictures on facebook or some other even ‘cooler’ book that might have come up..” Such photos are labelled in detail with proper care being given to make the emotion of the moment come out alive. The emotion more often than not is: Look how much fun we are having! Going through a facebook ‘home’ page one can notice that there is a sort of a competition going on between people – Who is more happy? Or Who is having more fun? And the like. While the exact emotion may change depending upon the contextual setting, the number game, the comparison rules the roost.

            Is this really happiness/fun? Do we even try to understand the meaning of happiness in metaphysical terms? What are the epistemological pathways concerning the label ‘happy’ or ‘cool’? Is it the number of likes or comments? Why is there so much of an urge to share and tell the world how happy you are? Haven’t we all fallen for the ‘soft power’ of capitalism? Why are our thoughts, actions and behaviour channelled with an eye on some social media platform?

            Aren’t we all, to borrow Weberian terminology, smaller cogs in the machine, trying hard to become bigger cogs?