What it is: Wikipedia says, “Jonathan Haidt is associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on the psychological bases of morality across different cultures. His book The Happiness Hypothesis examines ten “great ideas” dating from antiquity and their continued relevance to the happy life.”

Description: This book is a good basic collection of what modern academic psychological research has to say about being happy, sprinkled in with bits of wisdom from philosophical and religious traditions of the East and West. And you may wonder why the cover of the current edition is a picture of a man riding a swimming elephant, as seen from below. A central theme in the book is that being human is like being a rider on an elephant, the rider being our conscious intentional awareness, and the elephant being our instinctual habitual animal self. The elephant can be trained, slowly, so that it will obey the rider’s whims, but it takes time and patience. Trained, the elephant can do great things, but, if untrained, it can cause destruction. The book also talked at length about the need for love and human connection and for meaningful work for human happiness to flourish.

Anecdote: I read this book on my former housemate Barnaby’s suggestion. He emailed me and said ” I found it to be outstanding. It was the best of the ‘positive psychology’ books that I’ve read (seligman, czikszentmihalyi, etc) by far. A lot of good stuff on Buddhism, too. He says that the current data strongly supports three treatments for depression: SSRIs, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and meditation.” At one point, Barnaby told me, he started talking to a shaved-head guy sitting next to him at the passport office, who had the book with him, only to find out that the man (Reb Anderson) was the former abbot of the Zen Center that Barnaby had lived in for years.

Potential Turn-Offs: Haidt especially examined Buddhism, and its relevance to happiness. I thought that he made some interesting points about Buddhism. I think, however, that he misunderstood and misused technical Buddhist ideas by using the words in their conventional English meanings (i.e. using the word “attachment” as meaning simple caring or emotional investment, rather than the technical Buddhist meaning of a viscosity of internal experience that attempts to unnaturally hold, congeal around, and grab at experiences of pleasure, or “happiness” as simple pleasantness of mood, rather than the Buddhist meaning as liberation from constriction, congealing, and identification with phenomena that enables life to be experienced as natural unforced vibratory emanations from Divinity/Emptiness (which is a “happiness” that includes and transcends both mundane “happiness” and mundane “unhappiness”)). Every time he said, “In the end, I think Buddhism gets it wrong, and I think that happiness instead comes from …”, the thing he stated in contrast to Buddhism with seemed to me to be pretty Buddhist, or at least compatible with Buddhism.

What I Got out of it: I thought that the book was interesting and at times illuminating. I enjoyed it and am glad that I read it, and thought that it was better than most books I have read. Didn’t really blow me to the stars or anything though.

Learn more about The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt