Published in 2010, The Promise of Happiness is a work of cultural critique by feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. Combining philosophy, feminist theory, and critical race studies, the book challenges the widespread assumption that happiness is an unconditional good. Ahmed argues that happiness is a cultural imperative, or a “promise,” that directs individuals toward socially approved life paths and choices. The book investigates what the concept of happiness does by analyzing how it organizes desires, justifies social hierarchies, and maintains the status quo. Ahmed’s previous work in feminist, queer, and race studies includes The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and Queer Phenomenology (2006). The Promise of Happiness received the 2011 Book Prize from the UK’s Feminist and Women’s Studies Association. 

Ahmed critiques the contemporary “happiness industry” alongside longstanding philosophical ideas about happiness, exploring themes like Unhappiness as Political Resistance, The Exclusionary Nature of the Good Life, and The False Promise of Positive Psychology. To build her case, she draws on what she calls an “unhappy archive”—cultural works and intellectual traditions that challenge conventional ideas about happiness—and analyzes figures who fail to align with the happiness promise: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, and the melancholic migrant. Through these figures, Ahmed examines how those who challenge socially approved forms of happiness can become associated with unhappiness. Ultimately, the book argues for the freedom to deviate from prescribed paths, drawing on the root “hap,” or chance, to imagine ways of living that remain open to possibility rather than being determined by a moral duty to be happy.

This guide refers to the 2010 Duke University Press edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain discussions of racism, gender discrimination, antigay bias, and death by suicide.

Summary

In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed examines happiness as a social and moral imperative. Instead of treating happiness as a universal good or simply a natural emotional state, Ahmed investigates what the concept of happiness does in the world. She argues that happiness is a “promise” that directs our lives toward certain objects, choices, and social norms. This promise suggests that if we live in the right way—by pursuing marriage, family life, and other socially valued ideals—happiness will follow as a reward. Consequently, happiness operates beyond individual feeling, shaping desires and directing people toward ways of living that are already socially valued. This “happiness duty,” or the pressure to pursue happiness and be made happy by the right things, describes how individuals can be directed toward an existing social order.

Ahmed develops the concept of “happy objects” to explain how this alignment works. Happy objects can include people, relationships, institutions, material objects, or ideals that become associated with happiness. The family dinner table, a wedding day, or a national symbol such as a flag can function as happy objects that we orient our lives around in the belief that they will bring us fulfillment. By desiring these objects, we participate in reproducing the very social forms they represent. These orientations are learned through “happiness scripts,” which provide socially learned instructions about how to live a happy or good life. For example, traditional gender scripts have historically presented women’s happiness as dependent on fulfilling prescribed domestic roles, thereby naturalizing a specific division of labor. To follow these scripts is to “get along” by aligning oneself with socially approved paths to happiness, while to deviate from them is to risk being perceived as a failure or a problem.

To challenge this consensus around happiness, Ahmed turns to what she calls an “unhappy archive,” examining figures who challenge dominant ideas about happiness. She analyzes the “feminist killjoy,” the woman who spoils the mood by pointing out sexism, thereby exposing the unhappiness that is repressed for the sake of social harmony. She also explores the “unhappy queer,” who, by deviating from the heterosexual life script, is associated with unhappiness and used to reinforce the promise of happiness attached to heterosexuality. Finally, she discusses the “melancholic migrant,” examining how migrants can be expected to move beyond histories of racism and colonialism and embrace narratives of national happiness. Ahmed uses the feminist killjoy, unhappy queer, and melancholic migrant to explore feminist, queer, and antiracist histories of unhappiness.

Ahmed then turns to the relationship between happiness and the future, considering optimism, pessimism, revolutionary politics, and “happiness dystopias.” She develops the idea of the “freedom to be unhappy” (195)—the freedom not to accept happiness as an obligation and the freedom to deviate from the life paths that are presented as routes to a good life. Ahmed also considers how struggles for justice can cause unhappiness by challenging established forms of happiness, while emphasizing that causing unhappiness is not their aim. These discussions lead to her consideration of alternative possibilities for the future.

Ultimately, Ahmed returns to the etymological root of happiness, “hap,” which signifies chance or fortune. Drawing on this connection between happiness and “hap,” she considers ways of living that remain open to contingency and possibility, without being directed toward predetermined paths to happiness. This opens up possibilities that prescribed paths to happiness may foreclose. A politics of “hap” seeks to make room for possibility and for things to happen differently.