Lapham’s Quarterly

When journalist Peter Andrey Smith attended the 2017 World Happiness Summit in Miami, he asked everyone he met, “Who’s the happiest person here?” Many, he reported, pointed to themselves and said, “Me.”

Not long before his death in 961, Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III testified that over his fifty years of reign, during which “riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call,” he had “diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness.” Al-Rahman had counted only fourteen. “O man,” he lamented, “place not thy confidence in this present world!”

In 2016, Better Business World Wide hired “mystery shopping providers” to evaluate customer service around the world. The results were compiled in a Smiling Report, which found that Ireland scored the highest: 100 percent of customers received a smile. Shoppers in both Spain and Switzerland were greeted with a smile 97 percent of the time, while the lowest score was recorded in Hong Kong, where smiles occurred in only 48 percent of customer interactions.

First documented in the Divine Farmer’s Materia Medica Classic of the first or second century, the bark of the mimosa tree, known as he huan pi (“collective happiness bark”), is thought to harmonize the emotions and render a person worry-free. The manual advises that “protracted taking may make the body light, brighten the eyes,” and induce one to feel “as if one had acquired whatever one desired.” Modern practitioners sometimes call it “herbal Prozac.”

Maurice Sendak, author of classic picture book Where the Wild Things Are, claimed in a 2011 interview never to lie to children. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence,” he said. He was also in search of a “yummy death,” which he believed could be done “if you’re William Blake and totally crazy.” Two months later, less than a year before he died, Sendak returned to the topic. “I’m a happy old man,” he said. “But I will cry my way all the way to the grave.”

A late nineteenth-century concern for the nerve-racking speed of modern life prompted neurologist George Beard to introduce the term neurasthenia for a sickness whose symptoms include headaches, anxiety, impotence, insomnia, and lack of ambition. The condition was so prevalent in the United States that William James—who received the diagnosis along with his sister, Alice—referred to it as Americanitis.

Misfortune can cause a person unhappiness only when vice has already corrupted them, argued first-century Greek essayist Plutarch. “As a thread saws through the bone that has been soaked in ashes and vinegar, and as men bend and fashion ivory when it has been made soft and pliable by beer,” he wrote in a short piece collected in his Moralia, “so fortune, falling upon that which is of itself ill-affected and soft as the result of vice, gouges it out and injures it.”