“False beliefs” regarding the ability to find happiness in the accumulation and expenditure of money can facilitate economic growth and consumer behavior in a society—as noted by Daniel Gilbert. I have proposed that other social observers and critics, such as Erich Fromm and Christopher Lasch identified similar “fictions” about happiness, money, consumption, and self-image. While Gilbert, Fromm, and Lasch have acknowledged the short-term benefits derived from these fictions for many societies, they have also identified the destructive impact of these fictions.
Erich Fromm (1955) addressed this destructive effect by journeying back several centuries. He noted that spiritual loss during the 19th Century was destructive to all members of the European and American communities. The decline of religious faith (“God is Dead”) was common in the 19th Century. According to Fromm, during the 20th century, it was not a matter of God being dead; rather, it was a matter of “man being dead.” From Fromm’s mid-20th-century perspective, we only lived through what we possessed. The sense of an authentic, productive self was “dead.” A focus on possessions requires that we accumulate money and feel free (perhaps even compelled) to spend it. Fromm would probably suggest that it is not a question of “your money or your life”; it is more a matter of only finding life through your money.
And today? What do we do when we are held at gunpoint by our society? Do we pause as Jack Benny did, or do we declare that our life is something more than money and consumption? Do we declare that our sense of self might be elusive and saturated, but it is not for sale? If spending and buying are not the answer, then what is the answer? Do we require an emotional fix or a closer relationship with an important person if we are to feel “alive”? Perhaps, this is the major and most challenging question to be addressed by each of us in our mid-21st-century world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence, and contradiction (Bergquist, 2025).
Stephen Sondheim identified something about the ultimate nature of happiness in a song concluding his Broadway Musical, Company: The song is being sung by a friend of the show’s protagonist (Bobbie/Robert):
“Robert, how do you know so much about it when you’ve never been there?
It’s much better living it than looking at it, Robert”
“Add ’em up, Bobby, add ’em up”
Someone to crowd you with love
Someone to force you to care
Someone to make you come through
Who’ll always be there
As frightened as you of being alive
Bobbie acknowledges the value of this particular “baseline” of happiness:
Somebody crowd me with love
Somebody force me to care
Somebody let me come through
I’ll always be there
As frightened as you, to help us survive
But being alive
Being alive
Being alive
