Brief History of Trying (and Failing) to Science Our Way Happiness: What Decades Research on Happiness Missed

The happiness industry has been overpromising for seventy years. The research quietly disagrees.Scientists have spent decades trying to measure happiness, engineer it, and sell it back to you as a gratitude journal. A.M. Neel read four hundred studies to find out whether any of it works.It mostly doesn't.This is the story of the people who tried to turn wellbeing into a science, and what happened to them. The psychologist who proved lottery winners adapt back to baseline, then took his own life. The rats who pressed a pleasure lever until they collapsed. The Tibetan monks wired to brain scanners until the readings broke the equipment. The "positivity ratio" that swept the self-help world before a graduate student noticed the math was gibberish. And Finland, which keeps getting ranked the happiest country on earth by a population that will tell you, flatly, that it is not trying to be happy.Neel wrote the book while going through a divorce and a depression, which turned out to be the right place to write it from. This is not a book that will fix you. It is a book that will stop lying to you: about set points and gratitude apps, about the pursuit of happiness and why chasing it backfires, about the difference between a good life and a life that photographs well.Funny, humane, and quietly devastating, this is the happiness book for people who are done with happiness books."We're not trying to be happy. We're trying to not be miserable. Apparently that counts as happiness now."