Happiness is a political act, we talk about it with Giulia Blasi Why personal wellbeing is inseparable from politics, society, and collective responsibility
Happiness is not a private matter, nor an individual goal to pursue alone. On the contrary, it is a political, cultural, and deeply collective issue. This conviction is at the heart of Happiness Is a Political Act, the latest book by Giulia Blasi published by Rizzoli: an essay that weaves together personal experience, analysis of the present, and theoretical reflection.
The limits of individual perspective in the research for happiness today
Blasi explains that the book has a threefold origin: personal, political, and cultural. The starting point was a moment of deep individual fragility, which coincided with the re-election of Donald Trump. “I was in a very bad place,” she says. “I was convinced it would be a disaster, and unfortunately, the facts proved me right.” At the time, she recalls, many people dismissed those concerns as alarmism. But the years that followed revealed how misguided political decisions can produce concrete damage and widespread suffering. From this emerges one of the book’s central reflections: our tendency to judge what is “going well” or “going badly” only based on personal experience, without considering what happens beyond our immediate surroundings. According to Blasi, this limited perspective prevents us from understanding unhappiness as a collective phenomenon, and therefore from imagining collective wellbeing and political happiness in the same way.
Expectations change us
Unhappiness, the author explains, is not historically new. Human beings have always been unhappy for one reason or another. What changes, however, are expectations and the concrete possibilities offered by a given era. A clear example is women’s rights: a woman in the nineteenth century might have felt satisfied within a life we would now define as severely restricted, because she lacked the cultural and symbolic tools to imagine alternatives. A contemporary woman forced into the same conditions would hardly consider herself happy, because she would clearly perceive the gap between what is possible and what she is allowed.
Conspiracy, identity, and collective distress
According to Blasi, contemporary unhappiness has specific characteristics. In recent years, the manipulation of information and public opinion has reached extremely sophisticated levels, systematically working on negative emotions: fear, anger, resentment. These emotions have become central tools of political and cultural propaganda. To this was added an unprecedented global trauma: the pandemic, an event that has never been fully processed and continues to produce profound psychological and social consequences, deeply affecting mental health and emotional wellbeing worldwide. In this fertile ground, phenomena such as identity-based and conspiratorial cults take root. Giulia Blasi explicitly mentions QAnon, as well as the personality cult built around Trump. All are signs of collective distress that finds expression in destructive forms.
Why happiness is a political matter
It is here that happiness becomes explicitly a political act. Politics, understood as the organization of shared life, directly shapes the material and symbolic conditions that make a happy life possible. Laws on labor, working hours, welfare, and much more shape our time, our relationships, and our ability to care for ourselves and others. Overwork in alienating environments is one of the main drivers of unhappiness, as numerous studies analyzed by Blasi demonstrate. Although she does not believe in sudden or radical change, the author argues for gradually rethinking the system we live in. Happiness becomes a political matter when we stop considering it a private issue and begin recognizing it as a primary human need. It is not built in isolation or through the accumulation of wealth, but through relationships, shared spaces, and liberated time.
Accepting unhappiness as part of life
Alongside the collective dimension, however, Blasi insists on a point often removed from public discourse: the acceptance of unhappiness. “We are not always happy,” she says, “and we must accept that while searching for happiness, we also pass through unhappiness.” “In a society obsessed with efficiency,” she observes, “pain is not contemplated. When we suffer, we are told we don’t have time for it, that we must react, perform, ‘enjoy life.’ But there is no emotional fullness without accepting pain.” Claiming the right to feel unwell, to ask for help, and to recognize one’s fragility is an integral part of the search for happiness. On this point, the writer clarifies that emotions should be experienced, not necessarily performed. It is partly a generational difference, she acknowledges, but also a way of distancing herself from the spectacle of suffering, which risks emptying it of meaning.
Happiness as collective survival
Finally, there is perhaps the most difficult issue: caring about other people’s happiness. Not only those who resemble us or whom we love, but also those who irritate us or seem hostile. “The difference between those who seek happiness and those who live on resentment,” she observes, “is that the former desires the good of others, not their disappearance.” People who fuel hatred and destruction are often profoundly unhappy, unable to find a constructive place in society. Taking responsibility for others’ unhappiness does not mean justifying violent or destructive behavior, but questioning the roots of distress. Because, as Giulia Blasi concludes, this is not a moral issue, it is one of collective survival. The ability to care for the needs of others is what holds a society together. Accepting that happiness is a shared responsibility is the first step toward imagining it, and perhaps, one day, achieving it.