Top Highlights

• Americans buy a billion dollars’ worth of self-help books and audiobooks each year.
• The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been reached, a recipe for anxiety.
• Surprisingly, the higher the respondents rated happiness as a distinct personal ambition, the less happy they were in their lives generally and the more likely they were to experience symptoms of dissatisfaction and even depression.
• The authors of these studies concluded that paradoxically, the more people valued and were encouraged to value happiness as a separate life goal, the less happy they were.
• Americans as a whole invest more time and money and emotional energy in the explicit pursuit of happiness than any other nation on earth, but is all this effort and investment paying off?