Shiny Happy People

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But as countless studies have shown, when we're left to our own devices, not only do we tend to miscalculate what will make us happy, but personal satisfaction actually decreases as the number of choices increases -- whether we're talking about jobs or shoes or varieties of bread. Self-determination might fuel many of our aspirations, observes Hal Neidzviecki in his 2004 book Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity (Penguin Canada), but it can cut both ways.

'The self-esteem industry places the emphasis on you, your desires, needs, expectations, sacrifices, willingness to work hard,' Niedzviecki argues. 'This not only encourages us to consider ourselves capable of changing and taking control of our lives, but discourages any examination of the overall system in which we live our lives. . . . When we believe in the self-esteem mantra, we believe that we are always the source of our failures.'

Maybe that explains why, in spite of seven dozen Chicken Soup for the Soul books on the market (Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover's Soul, for example) and a multibillion-dollar self-improvement industry, we're still fatter, more depressed, and more in debt than ever before. Save for brief, albeit catastrophic, blips that rouse us from narcissism (9/11, the Asian tsunami), we are seemingly lost in our atomized worlds of self-perfection. And, ultimately, our single-minded pursuit of perfection might lead us farther away from that other all-American quest -- the pursuit of happiness.

'Have no fear of perfection -- you'll never reach it' was Salvador Dal?'s more radical attitude. What if we actually embraced our flaws as the qualities that make us human? Self-determination and self-improvement are commendable, but maybe we should turn a more skeptical eye toward the unyielding march toward perfection. As the philosopher John Gray recently observed, 'Belief in progress is the Prozac of the thinking classes.' Besides, if we all aimed for perfection, how different would we actually end up being? As we know from seeing The Incredibles: If everyone is super, then no one is.

SELF-HELP NATION

Number of Chicken Soup for the Soul books: 85

Total self-improvement market:

2000: $5.7 billion
2004: $8.56 billion
Estimated 2008: $12 billion

Number of Americans who take antidepressants: 20 million

Fastest-growing market for antidepressants: Preschoolers

Number of ads a typical kid sees by age 16: 6 million

Number of breast augmentations in 2000: 187,755

Number of breast implant removals in 2000: 54,271

Anjula Razdan is a senior editor at Utne.

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