Happiness has been used as guide to the good life for thousands of years. Edgware’s Julian Haines shows us how it can just as easily lead us awry as direct us towards a life well lived…

Happiness has been used as guide to the good life for thousands of years. It can, however, just as easily lead us awry as direct us towards a life well lived.

We must learn to see happiness as something more nuanced and differentiated. By doing so the target we set up can bring us much more life satisfaction. This is not to deny the importance of happiness, we just need to see our aim more clearly.

Many attempts to deal with the vast amount of psychological pain that exists in the world today have been to look at what causes distress. A new field of positive psychology has emerged which then tries to look at the issue from the other end of the telescope and look at what makes people happy.

This book is an attempt to understand happiness philosophically: what it is, how we are responsible for it and what we can do to get more of it. Happiness is our alarm to detect good. These alarms, though, are often set to detect what is bad, so we don’t even see what is good. We also often see good as something we need to possess and control to extract that feeling of happiness. We then expunge any feeling of good. By changing how we view good, we can change our experience of happiness to something more controllable and enduring.

Julian C. Haines has been working in the mental health field for over 25 years. This lead him to want to understand what makes people happy, and how they can have more control over what brings them joy in their lives. Happiness has been a project to try and understand more fully the nature of happiness and how we can best harness it.

Julian says, “The book was born from an interest in what makes people happy. This is a universal question and was born from trying to explore what makes me happy. It was also born from a frustration with what has been conventionally offered. My personal search for happiness had been through conventional spiritual routes but I was finding many of these less meaningful over time. It seemed to me that the search for happiness was what my search was about. This book has been as much a personal voyage of discovery about the nature of happiness and the consequences of my reflections on the subject matter.”

RELEASE DATE: 28/11/2022 ISBN: 9781803132839 Price: £9.99