Shopping for Happiness on Bleak Friday

What can we do to have a happy and meaningful life? Researchers say that happiness is not something that can be acquired or achieved through material possessions. Yet this year some 147 million Americans are rushing to find shopping bargains on the day after thanksgiving, a day known as Black Friday. If the shopping frenzy that is associated with this day is supposed to make us look forward to the holiday season, the day would be more apply labeled Bleak Friday.

Americans are bombarded with shopping possibilities. At the same time those of us who research happiness know that people are no happier now than they were in the past. Happiness has not increased since the 1950’s. Living standards have increased, but happiness has not. Only about 45 % of the richest Americans say that they are happy, whereas 33% of poorer Americans also say that they are happy. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle said that more than anything else we seek happiness, either for its own sake or in other things we hope and work for such as money, beauty, health, power. We hope these things will make us happy. Once we get above the poverty level, however, material things do not make us happy. In fact there is nothing like shopping on a Black Friday, with the frenzy of showing, pushing, grabbing, to make one feel down and depressed.   

Thanksgiving is approaching. Traditionally it has one of the few days when shops were closed.  In the absence of commercial activity, people visited with family, ate, drank, and told stories, watched parades and sports on television, or read books. This tradition has now changed. As the paragraph below indicates, even Thanksgiving is no longer a day to be shared with family and friends. The sacred god of shopping has descended on the 4^th Thursday in November bringing with it incredible sales that evidently cannot be passed up.

NEW YORK — Target Corp. will open its doors at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving, three hours earlier than a year ago, to kick off the holiday shopping season. The discounter joins several other major retailers, including WalMart Stores Inc., that are opening earlier in the evening on the holiday and staggering deals over the two-day period. Over the years, stores have been expanding their hours on Black Friday to get ahead of the competition, but the kickoff is increasingly happening right after shoppers finish their turkey feast.

Shopping can be fun; it can provide a brief uplifting feeling, a touch of excitement. But are we really giving up one of the few days a year when we can spend time with family, something that has been proven to actually make us happier and healthier, in order to shop. What are we shopping for? Is it for the people we leave at home on Thanksgiving in order to go and buy things to give them on Christmas, or Hanukkah, or Kwanza?   Will this shopping frenzy fulfill something that is missing from our life?

What does make us happy? Researchers agree that our genes help, our families and friends help, a sense of spirituality helps, goals help, what else? Psychologist Carol Ryff has proposed six key components of well-being and happiness. These include positive self-regard or self-acceptance, satisfying relationships, a sense of direction and purpose in life, feeling that one is using one’s potential and abilities, that our lives have a purpose; having choices in shaping life; and a sense of awareness that we can manage the stresses and demands of life. Happy people also choose to see the world and themselves in positive and affirming ways. They surround themselves with happy people. Those people are not to be found in WalMart on Black Friday or Black Thursday.