How to Be Happy / What Happiness Is

"If you had no money yourself, but a fairy godmother gave you exactly what you needed whenever you requested it, you would never make the Sunday Times Rich List, but you would be the richest person in the world, even if you gave everything away each night."
- This would suggest the following definition of happiness: a state in which a person is having their biologically/socially-determined needs met. (Or something along those lines.)

Books

Lists
- Goodreads - Best Happiness Books
Individual books
- Happiness: Lessons from a New Science
  - Looks good
- Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile
  - rec'd by someone in a review for 'Lessons from a New Science' as being a better book
  - Looks good
- Hardwiring Happiness
- The Happiness Advantage
- https://www.amazon.com/Private-Truths-Public-Lies-Falsification/dp/0674707583
  - rec'd by Balaji S.

Quora - Why are so many brilliant and talented people so brutally unhappy and dissatisfied?
Have people spend different amounts of time sleeping vs being awake and then see what balance between consciousness and happiness they choose. For example, I slept ten hours one day and felt much happier than if I had only slept seven hours. So I would rather be happier but have few hours awake.
Managing your attention seems like it's a major component.
- Examples:
  - Jacqui Saburido became more unhappy when she had her vision improved:
    - http://www.golaketravis.com/news.php?id=406
    - Other things to file:

“What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism,” James Joyce once said to his friend Arthur Power, “some unrealizable or misconceived ideal. In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off." (Source: typicalprog)

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."
- Einstein

2014.10.11 - The Australian - Silicon Valley guru Peter Thiel is on a mission to change the world

When I ask Peter Thiel whether he would describe himself as a happy person, he ponders the question as if it were a complicated mathematical equation.
“Um … let me think about that. Um … I always find it difficult answering that sort of question because it’s hard to precisely compare with other people. It’s such an interior type of thing…” – before finally concluding, “I think so.”

One thing I've noticed is that if I spend time thinking about or fantasizing about some imagined great life, I'll end up yearning for it.
- For example, I had no interest in fraternities in college, but I was recently researching fraternities / sororities and watching recruitment videos and found myself having feelings of wishing I had been in a fraternity. I remember college well enough to know that's a ridiculous feeling to have, but I can imagine someone else who hasn't been exposed to fraternities as much being tortured by that yearning.
- Another example: I think I've gotten this feeling while watching sports dramas or sports contests; I get swept up in the "reality" and start to yearn for being the best at that sport. I'll need to write down a more-specific example when I think of one, but I vaguely remember having this happen to me for random sports that I never had cared about before (like tennis or car racing or soccer).
  - Upon more reflection, I think I had this happen to me when I was watching YT videos about Lionel Messi. I got sucked into a "different reality" (not sure how to put it) in which soccer was very important for some reason.
  - It reminds me of M's stressing the importance of controlling the frame of a conversation: if you can control the "reality" / "frame" / "context" of a conversation, you have a lot of control.

http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/

BRAVE NEW WORLD? A Defence Of Paradise-Engineering

http://www.huxley.net/