You know the conventional wisdom that says if you think you're crazy, you're probably not? Surely a similar adage applies to happiness: If you say you're happy, you're probably miserable.
I don't mean fleeting moments of happiness, the kind that can waft by as you dance at your wedding or watch your child lead his soccer team to victory. I'm talking about people who are always announcing how happy they are: The friend who meets you for lunch once a year and spends the whole time evangelizing about her constant self-actualized joy. The person on Facebook who reports on the bliss rendered by his most recent meal of wood-fired flatbread and organic litchis. These people are exactly what Gertrude meant when she said to Hamlet: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." Well, almost exactly.
So what to make of the latest crop of happiness books? For example, "The Nine Rooms of Happiness" by Lucy Danziger and Catherine Birndorf, which helps you "clean up your emotional architecture," or Gretchen Rubin's bestselling "The Happiness Project," which chronicles her pursuit of certain philosophical, psychological and organizational precepts in order to be happier. Chief among her findings: Make your bed every morning.
Despite -- or more likely because of -- the commercial success of "The Happiness Project," Rubin has received some trouncing in the media. The wife of a hedge-fund manager, she lives in a three-story Manhattan town house and employs a baby-sitter and a housekeeper. With luxuries like that, it's not entirely clear why anyone would need to sing in the morning (one of the precepts) in order to raise her serotonin levels.
In fairness, happiness books tend not to be penned by folks living on minimum wage. It's easy to chide authors of this particular genre (which leans more toward self-help than scholarship) for wearing their sense of entitlement on their fine linen sleeves, for assuming that fulfillment can be a matter of "me time" rather than, say, full-time child care or the ability to shop at Whole Foods without checking every price (though Rubin does allow that money can buy happiness, depending on how you spend it).
