ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY SEYMOUR CHWAST

Is There a Formula for Joy?
	New books tout the secrets of happiness. Here's a look at how their recipes compare
	By Richard Corliss

Posted Sunday, January 12, 2002; 8:31 a.m. EST
In the past two weeks, we'll bet 150 people have wished you happy New Year. And at the supermarket or dry cleaner, someone wanted you to "have a nice day." The Democrats used to chorus, "Happy days are here again." The noted self-help guru Bobby McFerrin counseled, "Don't worry, be happy." Other pop singers tell us that happiness is "a thing called Joe" (Judy Garland), "what my life's about" (Vanessa Williams), "when you feel really good with somebody" (Al Green), "a warm gun" (John Lennon), "an option" (Pet Shop Boys). The old saloon singer Ted Lewis used to ask, "Is everybody happy?"

No. But enough people want to be—and will pay for the chance to forget their troubles, come on, get happy—that a huge industry of happiography has sprung up to feed the need. From Wholly Joy: Being Happy in an Unhappy World to The Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness, from the Buddhist Eight Steps to Happiness to I'd Rather Laugh: How to Be Happy Even When Life Has Other Plans for You (by Linda Richman, Mike Myers' mother-in-law), hundreds of books purport to help you feel a bit better. They speak to a primal yearning in the species. "Human beings want to have meaning," says Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania psychologist and director of the Positive Psychology Network. "They want not to wake up in the morning with a gnawing realization that they are fidgeting until they die."

Some of the happy-talk books may help their readers get through one or two dark nights of the soul. But the wisdom they ladle out is often scattershot, anecdotal, an Oprah sermon in paperback. Few of them are written by psychiatrists or psychologists; few are based on solid research.

That could be due to the suspicion with which health professionals—and many other educated adults—view the systematic pursuit of happiness. They see the happiness industry as a case of the bland leading the bland. Happiness may be an American doctrine, but it also triggers images of a blinkered, Father Knows Best '50s and of TV news anchors grinning through the latest report of troop movements or a lagging economy. To the army of skeptics, happiness is forgetting that a billion people go to bed hungry each night. Happiness is being too shallow to realize how miserable you should be. It's cocooning yourself from reality. When displayed wantonly in public, it is the cause of other people's unhappiness. Happiness, the argument goes, is abnormal—can it be cured?

For something so widely desired, so hotly derided, happiness hasn't got much attention from researchers. One reason is the difficulty of quantifying happiness: it is a condition that is diagnosed and defined not by the doctor but by the patient. Another is the medical community's tendency to study pathology, not normality. "In spite of its name and its charter," Seligman avers, "the National Institute of Mental Health has always been the National Institute of Mental Illness." He notes that when the NIMH was created in 1947, "academics found that they could get grants if their research was about curing mental illness."

Dan Baker, a psychologist who directs the Life Enhancement Program at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Ariz., supervised a survey of the mental-health canon. His team found 54,000 studies on depression and only 415—less than 1%—on happiness. Even today, Baker asserts, "the medical establishment continues to pooh-pooh happiness, because there's no money in it."

He means grant money. A serious researcher into happiness can still get a book deal. Baker's What Happy People Know (Rodale; 256 pages) and Seligman's Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (Free Press; 336 pages) buttress their pep talks with frequent citations of supporting studies and thoughtful hints for getting—and staying—happy.

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