THE HAPPINESS THEY SOLD YOU WAS NEVER YOURS

On the industry that transformed the right to fully exist into a monthly subscription package — and what happens when you cancel – By Marcello de Souza

There is a moment, almost imperceptible, when a company decides its employees must be happy. It is not a decision that appears in meeting minutes. There is no vote, no memo. It happens like a virus entering through the ventilation: someone from the top brass returns from a conference, someone reads an article in a business magazine during a flight, someone listens to a podcast between one call and another — and suddenly, as if a switch had been flipped, the silent order spreads: we need happy people in here.
And then the spectacle begins. Motivational phrases appear on the walls in bold letters. A decompression room springs up with colorful beanbags that no one uses because no one has time. HR launches an organizational climate survey with emojis — from the sad face to the smiling face — and celebrates when the average rises by half a point. A speaker is hired to talk about purpose for two hours on a Friday, and on Monday everything continues exactly as it was, only now with the added guilt that if you aren’t happy, the problem is you.
And it is precisely here that the trap snaps shut.
Because what no one says — what the formula sellers will never say, because it would destroy their business model — is that happiness turned into a corporate goal ceases to be happiness. The instant someone defines that you must feel something specific, in a specific place, at a measurable frequency, the thing dies. It becomes a metric. It becomes a KPI. It becomes another cog in the control machinery disguised as care.
Think with me, without pressure and without the filter we were taught to use. Have you ever been in a meeting where the leader asks “how are you feeling?” and everyone answers “fine,” while inside there is a weariness so old it has become part of the scenery? Have you ever filled out an engagement survey knowing that your real answer would be problematic — not for you, but for whoever will read it? Have you ever smiled in the hallway when what you wanted was to scream?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, you don’t need a wellness program. You need to understand what they are doing to your capacity to feel.
The fact is, there is something profoundly perverse in the way the corporate world has appropriated the word happiness. Perverse because the intention, almost always, is not for you to be happy. The intention is for you to appear happy. To function well. Not to complain. To produce with enthusiasm, or at least with the appearance of enthusiasm, because a visibly unhappy employee is a public relations problem — not a humanity problem.
I have seen this happen dozens of times. A multinational company hires a mindfulness program for its teams. Three months later, the management that approved the program lays off 15% of its staff without notice. Those who remain, bewildered, are invited to “breathe deeply and focus on the present.” Another company institutes “emotional health week” with lectures on resilience, while maintaining targets that force teams to work until midnight. A startup celebrates being named “best place to work” in the same quarter that three managers resigned due to burnout.
This is not a contradiction. It is the system functioning exactly as it was designed. The happiness program does not exist to change the structure. It exists so that the structure remains the same without anyone noticing. It is a sedative in pretty packaging. A bandage placed over a hemorrhage. And the most brilliant part — from the controller’s point of view — is that if you still feel bad after all this “wellness offensive,” the blame is transferred entirely to you.
“You didn’t practice the meditation.” “You didn’t apply the tools.” “You need to work on your emotional intelligence.” Notice the subtle transfer: the illness is environmental, but the prescription is for the individual. As if you could cure pneumonia by changing the way you breathe, without anyone closing the window through which the cold air enters.
In this sense, let’s talk about what is really happening, because if there is one thing that moves me after nearly three decades working with human behavior within organizations, it is the refusal to accept surfaces as explanations.
The corporate happiness industry moves billions. There are specialized consultancies, wellness apps, emotional gamification platforms, certifications in “applied positive psychology” that can be obtained in a weekend. There is an army of professionals whose income depends on you continuing to believe that happiness is a developable competency, a muscle that can be trained, a skill that can be taught in six modules with certificate included.
And none of them have any interest in telling you the uncomfortable truth: that genuine happiness — the kind that makes existence worthwhile — is not found, not trained, and not bought. It is earned. And earning it requires something no corporate program will offer: freedom.
Not decorative freedom — the “flexible hours” that in practice mean being available 24/7, or the “informal dress code” that hides the brutal rigidity of hierarchies. I am talking about real freedom. The freedom to think what you think without translating it into corporate language. The freedom to disagree without it becoming “lack of alignment.” The freedom to say “I am not okay” without triggering an intervention protocol. The freedom to be whole — not just the version of yourself that fits on a badge.
Now, stop and look at something you may never have looked at this way. Observe the leaders who are celebrated as “inspirational” on corporate social networks. Those who post about vulnerability while cultivating environments where real vulnerability is punished with invisibility. Those who talk about “psychological safety” at conferences and, behind the scenes, label those who question as “resistant to change.” Those who celebrate “diversity of thought” as long as the diverse thought arrives at the same conclusion they had already reached.
This is the theater of organizational happiness. And like all theater, it has actors, a script, and an audience. The difference is that the audience doesn’t know they are watching a play — they think it’s real life.
I met an executive who was promoted three times in four years. Each promotion came accompanied by a speech about meritocracy and recognition. He thanked them every time with the correct smile. After the third promotion, he sought me out. Not to celebrate. To tell me, with a voice of someone finally admitting what they have known for years: “I don’t know who I am outside of here anymore. I have a title, I have a salary, I have the respect of my colleagues. And I wake up every day with the feeling that I am living someone else’s life.”
This man was not clinically depressed. He didn’t need medication. He needed something much rarer and much more frightening: he needed to rediscover himself. He needed to reclaim possession of an existence that, at some imprecise moment between the first job interview and the third promotion, had been silently transferred to the organization.
And here is the question no Chief Happiness Officer will put on the agenda: how many people in your company are living lives they did not choose? How many smiles in the hallways are merely the continuous negotiation between who one is and who one needs to appear to be?
Make no mistake! Happiness — the kind that truly transforms, sustains, gives consistency to life — is not a feeling. It is not a state. It is not that moment of euphoria after a positive quarterly result, nor that temporary relief when the boss finally approves your project. That is satisfaction. It is relief. It is momentary pleasure. And while none of these are negligible, none of them are happiness.
Happiness is something that happens in a deeper layer of human existence. It happens when there is coherence between what you think, what you feel, and what you do. When these three dimensions are aligned, there is a kind of internal resonance — a silent vibration that life, even with its imperfections, is genuinely yours. When they are misaligned — when you think one thing, feel another, and do a third — what arises is that diffuse malaise, that feeling that “something is wrong” that neither vacations, nor bonuses, nor promotions can resolve.
And the corporate world, with rare and honorable exceptions, is a factory of misalignment. Not because it is inherently evil. But because it operates under a logic that, by design, subordinates the individual to the system. This is not conspiracy — it is structure. Organizations exist to produce results, and results require predictability. The thing is, human beings are not predictable. So the system does what it can to make them so: it creates processes, protocols, metrics, goals, evaluations, rankings. And when all of this is not enough to tame human unpredictability, it invents happiness as a tool of control.
“Be happy here.” “Live the brand.” “Have purpose.” “Bring your authentic self to work.” Each of these phrases, repeated with a complicit smile in onboarding sessions and corporate retreats, carries a subtext no one says out loud: “Be happy the way we need you to be.”
I confess that what astonishes me most is not that organizations do this. What astonishes me is the speed with which we accept it. The docility with which we absorb the narrative that, if we are not well, it’s because we didn’t “invest enough in ourselves.” The ease with which we swallow the idea that resilience is an individual virtue and not, as it often is, the body’s response to conditions no body should be forced to endure.
Look around. Count how many people you know who can say, without hesitation: “I chose this life. This routine is mine. These priorities are mine. I am not here out of inertia, fear, or lack of alternative — I am here because this is coherent with who I am.” Count. Likely, the fingers of one hand will be more than enough.
And it’s not because people are weak. It’s because the system is sophisticated. Sophisticated enough to make the cage look like a garden. To transform obedience into “engagement.” To rebrand the fear of being fired as “commitment.” To call exhaustion “dedication.” To dress asphyxiation in the costume of “strong culture.” And, of course, to sell happiness as the final veneer of this construction.
I want to be clear about something: I am not saying that happiness at work is impossible. I am saying it is impossible on the terms it is being offered. Because authentic happiness — the kind that arises from coherence, freedom, and the responsibility of building a life that makes sense — cannot be given by anyone. It cannot be instituted by internal policy. It cannot be delivered in a four-hour workshop.
It requires something the corporate world avoids like a pandemic: genuine confrontation. Confrontation with the very structures that generate suffering. Confrontation with leadership models that confuse authority with control. Confrontation with cultures that reward performance and punish humanity. Confrontation with the uncomfortable truth that, often, professional unhappiness is not a bug of the system — it’s a feature.
Because genuinely happy professionals are dangerous. Not dangerous in the destructive sense, of course. Dangerous in the sense that they think for themselves. They question. They refuse to accept the unacceptable just because it has always been that way. They negotiate. They set boundaries. They say no. They leave when they need to leave. And this type of person, although exactly what any healthy organization would need, is a threat to organizations that only function while obedience disguised as engagement remains intact.
So, what is to be done? If happiness programs are largely a facade, if the corporate wellness industry operates more as a painkiller than a cure, if the very organizational structure resists the genuine happiness of its members — what is the path?
The path begins with a decision that does not depend on any company, any manager, any program. It begins with you. And it begins, paradoxically, with an act of discomfort: stopping accepting what you are told about what should make you happy.
This is not teenage rebellion. It is not cynicism. It is lucidity. It is the adult, conscious refusal to outsource to any external instance — company, guru, platform, Instagram coach, algorithm — the work that only you can do: the work of knowing yourself, of asking yourself what truly matters, of building a life whose form corresponds to its content.
And this work is not glamorous. It is not photogenic. It does not fit into an inspirational talk. It involves looking at your own choices with a painful honesty. It involves recognizing where you are by choice and where you are by inertia. It involves admitting that, perhaps, that promotion you pursued for five years wasn’t yours — it was from the script someone wrote for you when you were too young to notice. It involves accepting that changing may mean losing: losing status, losing approval, losing the comfortable version of yourself that everyone around you has grown accustomed to.
It involves, above all, an understanding that motivational discourse avoids like poison: happiness is not the absence of pain. It is the presence of meaning. And meaning is not found on the surface. It doesn’t live in slogans, in positive affirmations before the mirror, in five-step morning rituals. Meaning is built when you accept inhabiting the complexity of your own existence without fleeing, without numbing, without pretending everything is fine when it isn’t.
I know a manager who made a decision that bewildered everyone around her. After seventeen years at a global corporation, director-level position, six-figure salary, she resigned. Not because she received a better offer. Not because she was in crisis. She resigned because, in her words, “I realized I was so busy being excellent that I forgot to ask myself if that mattered to me.”
The reaction from those around her was predictable. Colleagues said it was madness. Her family was apprehensive. The market classified it as a “career break.” But something extraordinary happened in the following months: for the first time in nearly two decades, she started sleeping without medication. She started making decisions without consulting a mental org chart of who would be affected. She began to recognize, with astonishment, that the voice inside her — the one that had been drowned out for years by urgencies, deadlines, and internal politics — was still there. Just waiting to be heard.
She didn’t find happiness. She found herself again. And happiness came as a consequence.
I am not saying everyone should resign. That would be irresponsible and simplistic. What I am saying is that everyone should ask themselves: where is my voice in this story? At what point did I stop deciding and start reacting? When did my professional life cease to be an expression of who I am and become a systematic denial of everything that makes me human?
There is a deliberate — and highly profitable — confusion between comfort and happiness. The entire market is built on this confusion. Comfort is the nice office. It’s the competitive salary. It’s the comprehensive health plan. It’s the Friday happy hour. None of this is negligible — on the contrary, they are basic conditions of dignity. The problem is when they are mistaken for happiness. Because genuine happiness, often, arises precisely where comfort ends.
It arises in the difficult conversation you finally had. In resigning from the project everyone expected you to lead. In the confession that you don’t know, when everyone expects certainty. In the decision not to laugh at the offensive joke. In the choice not to sell yourself for a title that means nothing but institutional vanity.
Authentic happiness lives in the discomfort of being free. Because being free hurts. Being free requires assuming the weight of your own choices without the relief of blaming circumstances, bosses, markets, or conjunctures. Being free means accepting that, if your life is not what you wish it were, most of the responsibility is yours — and this acceptance, although it crushes you in the first instant, is also the only thing that truly liberates.
Because if the responsibility is yours, then the power to change is also yours.
It is time to abandon the childish fantasy that someone — a company, a leader, a system, a guru — will hand you happiness gift-wrapped. No one can. Not because they don’t want to, although many truly don’t want to. No one can because happiness is not transferable. It is intransitive. It happens in you and through you, or it simply doesn’t happen.
And this is not loneliness. It is sovereignty. It is the recovery of something that has always belonged to you and that the world has spent a lifetime trying to manage on your behalf: your capacity to decide what makes your existence worthwhile.
If this text provoked something in you — discomfort, irritation, recognition, relief, a sudden urge to review what you are living — then it has fulfilled its role. Not because I have answers. I don’t. No one who claims to have them is telling the truth. What I have are questions — and the conviction that honest questions do more for human transformation than any pre-packaged answer.
So here is the last, and perhaps the most important one: if tomorrow you took off all the masks you wear — at work, in relationships, before the mirror — who would be looking back?
If you don’t know, it’s time to find out. And that is the beginning of everything.

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