Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

Description

What if the path to happiness meant abandoning our most dearly held beliefs? Be ambitious; find everlasting love; look after your health ... There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. These narratives can make our lives easier, and they might sometimes make us happier too. But they can also trap us and those around us. In Happy Ever After, bestselling happiness expert Professor Paul Dolan draws on a wealth of evidence to bust the common myths about our sources of happiness and shows that there can be many unexpected paths to lasting happiness. Some of these might involve not going into higher education, choosing not to marry, rewarding acts rooted in self-interest and caring a little less about living forever. By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we might each find a life worth living.

Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science at the LSE. He is an internationally renowned expert in human behaviour and happiness. Amongst various other roles, he wrote the questions that are being used to monitor national happiness in the UK and has advised many governments, charities and corporations on how to influence behaviour to improve wellbeing. His debut book, Happiness by Design, was a Sunday Times bestseller and dubbed 'the book that will make you quit your job'.

Smart, engaging and funny. . . will make you question everything you think you know about what you want -- Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women Passionate, provocative. . . a manifesto for a better society * The Times * One of the most rigorous articulations of the new mood of acceptance. . . a persuasive demolition of many of our cultural stories about how we ought to live -- Oliver Burkeman * Guardian * A very useful antidote to the pressures of modern living. Very few books change the way you think about yourself, but this is one of them. I would particularly recommend it to young adults with all these life choices ahead of them * Tablet * Paul Dolan knows what makes people happy - and what doesn't. Happy Ever After is illuminating, wise, profound. A magnificent achievement -- Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge A smart and irreverent look at the bad advice, lame instructions, and missing ingredients in society's recipe for a happy life -- Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness A splendid demonstration of how conventional aspirations can make us miserable -- Richard Layard, author of Happiness A timely warning that we need to question standard assumptions about what is good for individuals and society. Dolan makes a compelling case for putting people's own perceptions of their wellbeing at the heart of policy making -- Lord Gus O'Donnell, former Cabinet Secretary