Chinese Taoist philosophers Zhuangzi and Hui Shi took a walk on a bridge over the Hao River in the fourth century bc. “The minnows swim about so freely,” said Zhuangzi; “such is the happiness of fish.” Hui Shi responded, “You are not a fish, so whence do you know the happiness of fish?” “You are not I,” Zhuangzi replied, “so whence do you know I don’t know the happiness of fish?”

“Even if WDW [Walt Disney World] is the HPOE [Happiest Place on Earth], it is still part of Earth,” legal scholar Lauren A. Newell wrote in a 2012 paper. “Occupants of WDW are not immune from inclement weather, technical malfunctions, hunger, fatigue, or any other source of unpleasantness that exists in life.”

“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote of his failed 1965 master’s thesis in anthropology, in which he argued that the plots of stories, when graphed, conform to a set of standard patterns. “The apathy of the University of Chicago is repulsive to me. They can take a flying fuck at the moooooooooooooooon.”

The Talmud tells of a third-century rabbi named Joseph who died, saw a heavenly paradise, returned to life, and told his father of a world to come that would be “the reverse of this one—those who are on top here were below there, and vice versa.” “My son,” said his father, “you have seen a corrected world.”

Even before Jeremy Bentham wrote his own treatise on utilitarianism, Enlightenment scholars were attempting to quantify a happy life. In the eighteenth century, Glasgow professor Francis Hutcheson offered an equation for benevolence, defined as the desire to spread happiness to others, where b = benevolence, a = ability, s = self-love, i = interest, and m = moment of good. His formula: ba = m + sa = m + i, and therefore b = (m + i)/a.