Happiness is not necessarily dependent on professional success. Psychologist Anja Lehmann has found that members of volunteer fire brigades often have a greater sense of fulfillment than do professional firefighters.

And happiness is not necessarily related to success in other areas of life, either. For instance, Niklas Nitschke and Vadim Zakharov experience happiness creating art in a setting that is not prepared to appreciate it. Forced to rely solely on themselves, the two artists are free to engage with their art on its own terms.

Nevertheless, happiness is in part related to revealing ostensible laws of nature as cultural constructs. To illustrate this, artist Haseeb Ahmed joins forces with philosopher and Japanologist Elena Louisa Lange to show how Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism is unveiled in modern-day consumer practices: labels that decorate packaged foods like medals on the uniforms of military veterans cannot disguise the fact that – despite claims of fair trade and local production – a profit-driven market cannot flourish without exploitation. Yet the concept of fetishism is not used to criticize personal obsessions. In Julika Rudelius’s video of Chinese textile salesmen imitating celebrities, there is no sense that the artist disparages the men’s obsessions; on the contrary, her work is imbued with admiration for their working life.