The Happiness Industry - William Davies

• "one of the foundational arguments in favour of the market was that it served as a vast sensory device, capturing millions of individual desires, opinions and values – and converted these into prices."

• "once happiness monitoring tools flood our everyday lives, other ways of qualifying feelings in real time are emerging that can extend even further into our lives than markets"

• homo economicus - "a somewhat miserable vision of a human being who is constantly calculating, putting prices on things, neurotically pursuiung his own personal interests at every turn"

• "the market was a vast psychological audit, discovering and representing the desires of society"

• "the ideal of bringing the invisible realm of emotions and desires into the open, was now bound up with the ideal of the free market"

• " neoliberalism is a depressive-competitive disorder that arises because the injunction to achieve a higher utility score - be that measured in physical symptoms or money – becomes privatised"

• "authority in neolibs consists simply in measuring, rating, comparing, and contrasting the strong and the weak without judgement, showing the weak how much stronger they might be, and confirming to the strong that they are winning"

• "american neolibs does not favour competitive markets, but rather markets as a space for victors to achieve even greater glory and exploit the spoils"

• "If happiness resides in discovering relationships which are less ego-oriented, less purely hedonistic than those individualistic society offers, then social media are rarely recipes for happiness. the depressed and the lonely who have entered the purview of policy making

• "individuals seeking to escape relentless self-reliance and self-reflection turn to social media only to find that it further deepens the malaise brought about by the extreme individualism of neoliberalism. neolib sees the social as an instrument for one's own medical, emotional, or monetary gain – and in doing so perpetuates the vicious circle of self-reflection and self-improvement."

• "once social relationships can be viewed as medical and biological properties of the human body, they can be dragged into the limitless pursuit of self-optimization that counts for happiness in the age of neolib. "

• "Add mass behavioural surveillance to neuroscience, and you have a cottage industry of decision experts, ready to predict how an individual will behave under different circumstances"

• "What if we view psychology as a door through which we pass on the way to political dialogue, as opposed to physiology or economics"

• "The attempt to drag all forms of negativity under a single neural or mental definition of unhappiness is the most harmful of the political consequences of utilitarianism in general"

• "the pursuit of health and the pursuit of money should remain entirely separate"