Happiness for Dummies

Most folks balk at one-size-fits-all advice on the pursuit of happiness, but that doesn’t mean we can’t each become happier. Happiness For Dummies is a light, thoughtful, authoritative 32,000-word book about how to go about that. Some aspects depend a lot on who you are--human relationships, for instance. Some things usually represent major investments--homes and cars, for instance. Still other things are only as important as you feel they are--sound systems, for instance. Sometimes, advertising has created needs where none existed before—leisure time, for instance. In areas like love and work, it’s sometimes even necessary to unsnarl the English language and clarify what’s going on in your head and heart.
Happiness is a feeling, not a fact, and today feelings are at the mercy of advertising. Ads make us unhappy. Then they suggest that if we buy something or do something, a Magic Kingdom will open. Ads appeal not to logic but to feelings and to our wish to trust authority, even if it’s just the advice of an actor in a commercial. Ads’ impact is enormous, but they don’t have our best interests at heart.
Most people think they’d be happier if they had more stuff. Studies indicate this isn’t really true. In the last 250 years, personal wealth—world Gross Domestic Product per person—has grown 37-fold, but global happiness has decreased during that same time.
Questions arise. How much quality in, say, table settings is really necessary to you? What other uses might you find for money if you weren’t spending every cent you earned? How can you amuse yourself without investing anything but time? In what ways is “keeping up” useful and in what ways does it just add complication? Post-materialists tend to spend extra time on creative things, family and nature. Maybe you’d add other things to that list. The point is that happiness is possible. You just have to learn how to pursue it.