Such papers were always by a young student (no student over the age of 22 says something so ridiculous), as well as white, middle-to-upper-class, and American (none of my students from Latin-America, Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, or even the lower tax brackets of the U.S. ever wrote such silly papers, either). It's apparently easy for folks who've never had real problems to tell everyone else to get over theirs; such a tragic lack of imagination these students have.
There are of course multiple problems with the rhetoric of "choosing to be happy," viz: it makes the clinically depressed feel even worst, for telling them to "just get over it" is like telling a cancer patient to "just be healthy"; it perpetuates the pernicious puritan doctrine that only the sinful suffer, and therefore if you're sad you deserve it, just like that girl was asking for it, I mean, look at that dress...; it's also weird for adherents of a religion that preaches "are we not all beggars?" to blame the sufferer, or for believers of "wickedness never was happiness" to claim that happiness is a choice--does that mean I can be evil and still choose to be happy about it, even in hell?
Then there's just the gross misreadings of these students, like when they cite "the patience of Job," the Biblical figure who supposedly bore all his sufferings with quiet patience, somehow skipping the 40 straight chapters of Job complaining very loudly to God. Serious, does no one actually read the Book of Job anymore? I swear, I need no other defense of literary studies than this: we learn how to examine what a book actually says, not what everyone thinks it ways. But Job's not even the most egregious misreading these students perform!
For every last one of these papers cited Victor Frankl, the Jewish-Austrian psychologist who survived the Holocaust, then wrote a best-selling book about it called Man's Search for Meaning. The gist of the text is that man's primary motivation is not pleasure (as Freud initially thought) or power (as Nietzsche taught), but meaning. If you can find a meaning, you can handle most anything, even Dachau; Frankl even repeatedly quotes Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how." Hence, Frankl was able to survive the Death Camps when many physically stronger men succumbed, because he found meaning in his sufferings.
These young students then somehow conflate this search for meaning with the search for happiness (not the same thing!--perhaps they get the M. Russell Ballard book Man's Search for Happiness mixed up in their head?--In any case, meaning and happiness are not synonyms), and they make Victor Frankl their Exhibit A of how one can "choose to be happy," even in the Holocaust!
But, once again, here's the value of the English major, for I've actually read the books that everyone cites, and having read Man's Search for Meaning, I can testify that, guys, Victor Frankl did not actually enjoy the Holocaust! He found meaning in it, yes, and with it the strength and the resolve to survive and escape it, but guys, he was still trying to survive and escape it! At no point in his book does Frankl ever say he was happy during the Holocaust. Not once does he turn to his fellow prisoners and say, "Welp, no use complaining about it, cheer up everyone, let's choose to be happy!", and then proceed to whistle a happy tune during slave labor, give a chirpy good morning to the SS Guard, plaster a smile on his face while he crapped his guts out with dysentery, and cheerfully skipped through an enforced death march in the snow without shoes--and when the Americans liberated Dachau, he didn't say, "Oh no need to free us, for you see, I've chosen to be happy here, no matter where I am!" Serious, I do believe his fellow prisoners would've killed him if the SS didn't first.
Frankl even explicitly says that "happiness must ensue," that is, one must have a reason to be happy! Frankl does not confirm but repudiate the rhetoric of "choose to be happy," because happiness must result--you do not choose it. Now, one can perhaps choose to find some meaning in one's life, and with it the wherewithal to not just survive but overcome, and even create the conditions by which happiness may at last be possible. But again, do not make the juvenile assumption that happiness is a choice. It is far grander than that. It is not a bag of chips on a grocery aisle, or a shirt on a rack, for you to just pick out and try on. (Mayhaps our American conflation between consumption and fulfillment explains in part why we are all such anxious, neurotic messes).
The irony is that, of all my students, the ones that were most genuinely charming, cheery, pleasant, interesting, intriguing, fascinating, kind and decent are the ones that have actually survived horrific tragedy--poverty and assault and oppression and abuse and so forth. You could then claim that these students are living proof that happiness is a choice, except that these were never the students who wrote me such ridiculous papers. They knew better. They'd suffered too much. Any happiness, peace, and/or contentment they had was hard-won, incomplete, and ensued from some other meaning they'd found in the midst of tragedy. What's more, tragedy had fleshed them out, made a much fuller human being out of them, than the young ones who wrote about "choosing happiness," who still did not yet know the meaning of either choice or happiness.
But I also tried to not be too hard on those papers when I got them; these students were merely too young, too inexperienced, to know better, is all. They didn't need me to burst their bubble; life would show them soon enough.
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