Leisure Studies
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components of “Happiness Studies” perhaps here better called happiness
marketing.
Can there be any legitimate question that mainstream academic research
“has advanced alongside the mushrooming of a hungry popular market for
guidance on what ‘happiness’ really is” (Ruark, 2009)? One organization of
several which have become self-appointed codifiers and indexers of the “life
coaching” field, a spin-off of happiness research, grew from two-thousand
members in 1999 to more than 13,000 in 2009. National Public Radio aired a
piece in 2007 which took as its prime example of the field the then best seller
The Secret. In this enormously popular book (very thickly larded with quotes
from other “specialists in the field,”) television producer Rhonda Byrne explains
that everything in the universe vibrates on a particular frequency. According the
Byrne, by tuning thought to the same frequency as, for example, companionship
or money, the thinker will attract wealth, love, health, and, of course, unlimited
happiness.
Byrne’s tissue of fantasy is a very far cry from acknowledging the suffering
of the natural world and reducing this suffering, or managing the impact of such
suffering as exists, by one’s acceptance and comprehension of reality, as
Buddhism might suggest. Or, for that matter, from the “hard work,” of leisure in
the sense given it