Happiness, and all that crap

The question of happiness and how to get it is endlessly entertaining. It’s one of the few topics on which we are all experts, having spent a large part of our lives thinking about how to obtain more of it. For some years before the global financial crisis one could hardly open a newspaper without coming across stories on happiness and how to find it. For editors, putting the word “happiness” in a headline became de rigueur. And of course the marketers picked up on the trend. Suddenly i...