Think about what happiness meant to you about 20 years ago. Or for your parents or your grandparents. Happiness was something that happened on Sundays watching football with friends, Saturdays walking with the family, afternoons at the bar enjoying a glass of wine. It certainly wasn’t about getting up early to get to the office first and accomplish all your goals, the first.

The model of happiness has changed, and it is not coincidental. José Carlos Ruiz, philosopher and author of the theory of posthappiness, Explain what is the origin of this change. Perhaps understanding this will allow us to turn around before it is too late.

The post-happiness

The data makes it clear. The new generations believe that work should be something they enjoy, something that makes them happy. This germ, little by little, seems to have spread to those who belong to previous generations. Now being happy is a goal, and the means to achieve it is productivity.

Philosophy analyzes these phenomena from multiple perspectives, in a silent fight against what we know as ‘positive psychology’.. Byung-Chul HanKorean philosopher and 2025 Princess of Asturias Award winner, explains it in The fatigue society. Happiness has become the driving force, an obligation for modern life.

The work of José Carlos Ruiz fits almost like the gears of the clock in the theory of Korean. What we pursue with eternal lists of objectives, overtime and an uninterrupted process of personal optimization is not happiness, It is post-happiness.

And the origin of it, explains in It Makes Sense Podcastis located in a clever move from positive psychology.

The master move

“Eva Illud and Edgar Cabanas explain it very well in a book called Happycracia,” says the philosopher. “It is a wonderful book where they tell that, in the year 2000 in the United States, Martin Seligman, who directed the APA (American Psychological Association), contacted the president of the United States to implement a barbaric process of injecting the idea of ​​happiness into the world of work. And positive psychology is born.”

This branch of psychology differs from the traditional one with a change in perspective. Instead of alleviating the “deficiencies” or “defects” of the human mind, It focuses on enhancing its “virtues.” Hence the term “positive.”

Seligman sells this idea to the US, and the president buys it. Because? “Well, they buy it because they discover that, If you can make a person feel happy in their job, they produce three times more”says the philosopher.

Work harder to be happy

With this new idea on the table and million-dollar investments in scientific articles that demonstrated that happiness at work was essential, the idea began to catch on. “That’s where this whole idea that happiness is something objective begins. and that has to be achieved at work,” Ruiz continues with his explanation.

The paradigm shift is evident. Before the 2000s, “work was a means to life, but it was not an end to happiness,” adds the philosopher. Happiness was located in the life project, in the family, in leisure, in free time. “If they were also happy at work, it was a treat,” he exclaims. “How long has it been since people consumed leisure as a delight, but also as another time to produce more?”he adds.

Certain champions of positive psychology, in fact, defend that leisure should not be something random, but rather that happiness depends on the way in which we take advantage of it for self-improvement. This, explains José Carlos Ruiz, distorts everything we have learned during 2,400 years of philosophy: that happiness is not the goal, but the result.

Happiness is the result

If we look back, we will discover that this idea of ​​happiness as a goal has only been on the table for 20 years. Before that, Happiness had always been seen as the result of a life path towards a place.

For Epicurus, for example, happiness was the consequence of delight, and this was the result of satisfying needs. Eat when you are hungry, drink when you are thirsty, sleep when you are sleepy.

For Aristotle, his famous eudamonia: the development of power, the feeling that we improve. For Kant, “the constant pleasure of life when one lives by virtue.” In no case is happiness the objective, it is the consequence of living well.

However, this new trend in positive psychology puts happiness as its goal. You no longer have to study, for example, to develop your potential, and as a consequence you are happy. Now you study to be happy. You work to be happy. You go running to be happy. And by placing happiness as the epicenter of our motivation, without realizing it, we have become slaves to it.

Happiness should be, without a doubt, the consequence of a life well lived. One in which, as José Carlos Ruiz points out, Leisure stops being productive, and becomes your own time again. One in which the life project plays a more important role than the work project. One in which we remember what is important.