For years now, I’ve written that ruminating on one’s happiness is probably not helpful. Happiness is not the point. And if you make it the point, then you’re not going to be happy.
This view has put me at odds against the dozens of popular “How to Be Happy” books that have been published in the past ten years. It’s forced me to give advice contrary to the field of positive psychology, which exploded in the past few decades.
And it’s made me the proverbial turd in the punch bowl of the self-help industry party.
But What Do We Know About Happiness?
Well, Christmas came early for me this past year. Because a couple months ago, a paper was published that analyzed thousands of happiness studies across multiple decades of research to see if we had learned how to make people happier.
The results were damning. Not only have we not gotten any better at making people happier, but interventions have actually become less effective than they were twenty years ago.
I’ve written about how, after more than half a century of theorizing and study, psychotherapy is no more effective than it was when Freud was still seeing penises everywhere.
In the 1990s, Martin Seligman declared that psychology would no longer merely focus on what…
