The Society of Immediate Happiness Is Now Taking Over the World.

This will continue to have a profound impact on our societies in the future.

For centuries and centuries, the idea that dominated mortal life was that we had to make efforts to achieve our ends, to work before enjoying the fruits of our labor. This was the world of deferred happiness, the lesson of the Bible, which condemns, after the fall, humans to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, but also that of a Republican school which, dominated by meritocratic values, willingly postponed true happiness.

For schoolchildren after class, during the vacations. For the workers at the time of retirement. For communists after the revolution and for Catholics after death, in heaven.

“No pain no gain” is a message that fairy tales also used to make children hear. Thus the story of the Three Little Pigs, which, according to Bettelheim, wonderfully illustrates the idea that one must know how to postpone one's happiness, not to renounce it, but to ensure it solidly.

Remember: the first Little Pig is like the child who lives in the principle of pleasure, he wants everything right away, “whatever it takes”, happiness here and now, for which he hastily builds a straw house, the one that requires the least effort, but also the one that protects the least. “Who fears the big bad wolf!” sings the silly boy, who is immediately devoured.

The second is a little less childish, it is halfway between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, between the child who lives in the short term and the adult who takes the time to work before going to play. He begins to understand that he must postpone his happiness to devote some effort to building a wooden structure, a work that requires more time and intelligence, that already protects better than a simple piece of straw, but that will nevertheless prove insufficient.

Full of contempt for his two brothers, whom he judges to be lacking in maturity, common sense, and moral rigor, the third Little Pig puts all his energy into building a solid brick house, a slow and arduous task that forces him to postpone his pleasures, but which, in the end, will enable him to get rid of the wolf.

We are here at the heart of the old, traditional logic of deferred happiness.

With the collapse of the principles of the Republican meritocracy at school, but also of the two great narratives of hope, Christianity and Communism, we are witnessing in positive psychology and personal development theories a return to the ancient pearls of wisdom, stoicism, and Buddhism, which, far from inviting us to postpone happiness, promise it to us here and now, provided that we learn to “savor the present moment”.

To measure the magnitude of this historical break, we must remember that communism represented 25% of the electorate in 1960, whereas it has fallen to 3% today in a country like France. At the same time, 90% of the French were baptized, whereas today only 30% are!

The ideologies of the “happiness of the world” invite us from now on to do away with deferred happiness, to get rid of these sad passions which are nostalgia, which pulls us towards the past, and hope, which pushes us towards the future: because to hope for health, wealth or love, is to be sick, poor and unloved, it is to be in lack and to put off happiness until later whereas it is here and now that one must be happy.

As Seneca says, “by dint of living in the past or the future, we fail to live”: the past is no more, the future is not yet, they are nothingness, only the present is and we are rarely there! If we have only one life, it is here and now that we must live it with joy, not after the class, retirement, revolution, or death.

And, in these conditions, we must not lose it to gain it, the terrestrial or celestial paradises of happiness postponed to a later date being only a trap.

Hence the changes that affect our relationship with illness as much as with the world of work, hence the fact that our societies of immediate happiness have put life and health above the economy and money during the Covid pandemic, while new demands for autonomy, responsibility, social utility and well-being at work have emerged in the company, developments that we can predict are only just beginning.