Happy Ever After - Paul Dolan

Description

'A passionate, provocative book. It isn't just a self-help book. It is a manifesto for a better society' Sunday Times

'One of the most rigorous articulations of the new mood of acceptance...a persuasive demolition of many of our cultural stories about how we ought to live' Oliver Burkeman, Guardian

Paul Dolan, the bestselling author of Happiness by Design, shows us how to escape the myth of perfection and find our own route to happiness.

Be ambitious; find everlasting love; look after your health ... There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. These narratives can make our lives easier, and they might sometimes make us happier too. But they can also trap us and those around us.

In Happy Ever After, bestselling happiness expert Professor Paul Dolan draws on a variety of studies ranging over wellbeing, inequality and discrimination to bust the common myths about our sources of happiness. He shows that there can be many unexpected paths to lasting fulfilment. Some of these might involve not going into higher education, choosing not to marry, rewarding acts rooted in self-interest and caring a little less about living forever.

By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we might each find a life worth living.

Review

Based on the description for this book I thought I was going to be reading a self-help book. But instead I found it to be more like a text book for academics on the subject of happiness complete with graphs, or in the case of my kindle ARC no graphs, which wasn't helpful. I can only assume if you buy the kindle edition there will be graphs.

I was off to a bad start with this book when the author proclaimed that as an LSE professor he was not expected to swear. He then goes on to say that there is no correlation to swearing being due to poor vocabulary/and or low intelligence. There is however evidence to suggest that students pay more attention to a teacher who swears! That's my exclamation point. The author then says that swearing is only ever harmful when it is aggressive or abusive and proceeds to litter the book with swearing as if to prove his point. This I found unnecessary and crude and felt it didn't help me learn in the slightest.

The book carries this rather sanctimonious attitude throughout and really I felt I was being preached at. Yes, there are studies in the US and UK reported with "x" results - but we all know about statistics! I thought this book was going to be a little bit more real life than quoting research at me.

At the beginning of each chapter you are asked  two questions about yourself and then the same two questions thinking about them in relation to a friend - at the end of each chapter the conclusion is then revealed. When I wrote papers my conclusion had to be a paragraph - succinct, sum up what I had written. Unfortunately the conclusions in this book were so long winded and over many pages, that I lost the point of the conclusion. 

There were a few glimpses of things that I thought - "now this is interesting" but they passed and in the main I found the book unappealing. If you are going to be writing a thesis I can imagine you will find plenty of material to quote in this book. If you are just someone interested in being happier maybe look up the art of hygge!

I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars.