Authentic Happiness Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting ... Book

Is this authentic happiness?

JDN 2456177 EDT 13:59.

When I started Authentic Happiness, I had the highest hopes—that this might finally be the way out of my depression. When I finished reading it, I felt even more hopeless and depressed. Now that I've had some time to reflect on it, I just feel ambivalent and disappointed.
Seligman promises to offer us a fundamentally new approach to psychology, focused not on curing illness but on supporting flourishing, not on treating depression but on creating happiness. He promises to build a foundation for this program based on honest appraisal of personal strengths and a life of virtue.
He... does not succeed. He does not completely fail, and perhaps he points us in that general direction, but he doesn't get us there.
The worst parts are when he tells us the key to happiness lies in self-delusion. He doesn't do this often, but once would be too many. The delusion he most commonly advocates is what he calls “optimism”; optimism might sound like a good thing, but listen to how Seligman defines it. For Seligman, an optimist believes that good things are always personal, permanent, and pervasive, while bad things are always impersonal, temporary, and local. Of course, this is simply not true. In reality, both good and bad things can be either personal or not, permanent or not, pervasive or not.
In fact, I think my depression involves a delusional level of pessimism, believing that bad things are worse than they really are and good things are not as good as they really are. So in that sense, I should be recalibrating my perception. But Seligman doesn't help us to recalibrate to the truth; instead he tells us that higher optimism is always better, even if it makes you into a raving maniac.
One thing I really do try to do is repeat a list of affirmations about good things in my life. But when I do this, one criterion is absolute: They must be true. Without this requirement, the whole enterprise falls apart; we might as well be wireheads. This is not authentic happiness at all, but happiness founded upon lies.
Most of the time, Seligman actually seems to appreciate this, and encourages us to focus on our real strengths instead of pretending we have strengths we truly lack. But about once a chapter or so, he slips, and tells us that we should nurture positive illusions. It's weird; for him there doesn't seem to be a big difference between happiness due to good things and happiness due to delusional attitudes. For me, the difference is absolutely fundamental.
It was Seligman's slips that triggered my despair on the train ride home from Chicago. I realize now that it was an overreaction, but this was my thought process: 1. People with positive illusions are happier. 2. Therefore, the only way to be happy is to delude yourself. 3. Therefore, life is awful; anyone who sees life as it truly is will be unhappy. 4. Therefore, life is pointless and we may as well just die.
I'm sure this is not what Seligman intended to say. But at least in that dark moment, it was what I heard. And it is what I still hear, from hedonists on the Internet who literally can't understand why I would rather be honestly sad than delusionally happy, why I would want to live an authentic and virtuous life when I could simply drug myself into bliss. They are, in short, wireheads—or pre-wireheads waiting for the technology to mature.
If Seligman truly believes in authentic happiness, he needs to be much more careful to exclude this kind of thinking. He must say, “You should be more optimistic—if you are currently too pessimistic. You should focus on your strengths more—if you currently focus too much on your weaknesses. You should have more self-esteem—if you are currently self-effacing.” Without that proviso, he comes off as saying that it's just fine to be a wireheaded narcissist. And a lot of people apparently really believe that!