Happiness Scripts

Happiness scripts are Sara Ahmed's idea that certain paths will guarantee us happiness. Some of these scripts include "financial affluence, professional acclaim, relaxing vacations, enriching friendships, harmonious marriages, well-behaved children, and so on." While our society promotes the idea that aspiring for these goals will ensure happiness, they often "fail to deliver what they promise," and are very hard to achieve. Happiness scripts inspire the idea that "our exertions will in due course bear fruit," and that if we just keep at something eventually we will attain it. Thus, our failure to attain happiness and our goals is placed on us, even when it is due to external circumstances. Thus, as Mari Ruti notes, "those who fail to live up to dominant ideals of happiness end up carrying the burden of bad feelings whereas those who prosper push these feelings aside... proponents of dominant happiness scripts... suppose that those who struggle are the architects of their own discontent" rather than recognizing the ways in which society marginalizes and oppresses certain groups and individuals.