Adrian Wooldridge likes a good coffee, but not when it comes served with a plastic smile.
"I've just got a cup from Pret A Manger," he says with a mix of both frustration and annoyance, "and everybody in there seemed to be almost delirious with happiness."
It's not that Adrian has an instinctive set against being joyful. It's just that he prefers his enthusiasm to be natural, not forced.
"Very large numbers of companies are mandating or at least encouraging their workers to be happy," he says. "They want them to have a smiley face; they want them to be bubbly and enthusiastic."
Wooldridge, who writes the Schumpeter column for the Economist, focussing on business, innovation and entrepreneurship, says this kind of mandated happiness functions as an instrument of corporate control.
"Pret A Manger actually will have people — 'mystery shoppers' — who will go in and rate the workers on how happy the whole team is," he says.
"Any member of the team that lets the team down will be negatively judged. That creates a lot of social pressure to be happy."
The emotional labour of happiness
Other companies, like the shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, Wooldridge says, now select people on the grounds of their capacity to be happy.
He sees a time in the near future when workers in all sorts of occupations will be measured and rewarded according to their expression of happiness.
"One sociologist has called it 'emotional labour'. You're being paid for your capacity to feel or at least to express emotions," he says.
"This is happening at a time when we are seeing an increasing casualisation of the labour force, zero-hour contracts, the ability of managers to get rid of people, to sack them.
"On the one hand you have a pressure to be upbeat all the time, and on the other hand you have a very brutal labour force which quite quickly gets rid of people."
The end result, says Wooldridge, is cynicism and despondency.
"What you tend to have with emotional labour is that you get a lot of burnout with people," he says.
"People are expressing emotions that they don't feel or they are over-expressing emotions that they do feel, and that's a tiring and difficult thing to do in the long term.
"In the short term it's great for the company; a sales-oriented company has a lot of positive response from what they do. In the longer term I think it's just another thing that drags workers down."
Viva la Stoics!
Schumpeter isn't alone in questioning the "cult of happiness". Popular British author and social psychologist Oliver Burkeman has also written about the "power of negative thinking".
Burkeman argues a fixation with attaining personal happiness often serves to imprison people, rather than liberate them.
"The relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity," he says.
"Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers understood the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism, a striving for success and security with an openness to failure and uncertainty."
Joseph Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of NSW, agrees.
"The ancient Greeks cultivated drama and tragedy for a very particular purpose," he says.
"The idea was that individuals should learn how to cope with negative affect and should expect negative things to happen to them."
He dates the emergence of happiness as a universal ideal to around about the time of the enlightenment. Like Burkeman, he believes the veneration of happiness depletes our natural resilience.
"We really don't have much of a culture of dealing with tragedy and dealing with unexpected negative events," he says.
The power of pessimism
Professor Forgas's latest research has focussed on the influence of mood states on performance.
"A number of our experiments looked at the kind of judgemental mistakes or errors that people commit," he says.
"We find that when we induce people into a mild negative mood before performing a judgement, they typically are going to be more accurate, and they get it right more often."
Similarly, he says, negative mood has benefits when it comes to remembering information.
"People in a mild negative mood tend to look at the environment in a more careful and attentive way and they tend to remember what they see around them," he says.
In other words, people who are excessively positive can sometimes fail to notice the mistakes or dangers that lie before them.
Professor Forgas stresses the word "mild" in championing the virtues of pessimism.
But that's at least one reason to embrace your inner grump in the workplace.
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