Everyday existence is filled with fictions that individuals enact for happiness and, more often, for survival.
They portray a carefree life of beauty, luxury and happiness that unfortunately, more often than not, is a false advertisement.
"And if happiness is spreading more reliably, then on average you're going to be catching happy waves more often than you catch sad waves".
Most people say that they want to be happy but if asked what happiness is for them, more often than not, they do not know what they want.
Research on the neuroscience of happiness indicates that we more often think negative thoughts than positive ones.
Michael Norton of Harvard Business School gave a TED talk in April pointing out that money more often buys happiness when it's spent on someone else.
Perhaps as an indicator of the still-guarded condition of the national economy, the words "world," "country" "love" and "service" showed up far more often than "money," "happiness" and "success".
But more often than not, we define happiness as some variation on our own lives, or at least the lives of our expectations.
The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism — the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness.
But then she read, in Andrew Weil's 2011 best-seller, "Spontaneous Happiness," that people living alone tended to get depressed more often and more easily than people who lived together.
