Happy Ever After: Escaping the Myth of the Perfect Life
PAUL DOLAN
(ALLEN LANE, 240 pp £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

This is a book about happiness, or rather the gap which exists between society’s ideal of well-being – good job, meaningful relationships, plenty of money – and the reality of ordinary life. The author of the best-selling Happiness by Design, Paul Dolan is professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, and a chief ­scientific adviser to the Government, all of which makes him supremely qualified to take a rational look at this most vital of subjects.

The book is divided into three principal sections, which are in turn divided into three subsections. “Reaching” looks at wealth, ­success and education; “Related” explores marriage, monogamy and parenting; and “Responsible” deals with the slightly more nebulous concepts of altruism, health and volition (or self-determination). The author draws on his own and others’ statistical findings to underpin his conclusions, which gives the book its undoubted intellectual weight.

The results are not quite what one would expect, and in turn both reinforce and deconstruct one’s prejudices. Take wealth, for example. Western culture assumes a straight-line relationship between money and happiness: the more money you have, the happier you are likely to be. While this is true for the poor, who are distinctly miserable, it is gratifying to learn that the super- rich are not much happier, the happiest of all being the “comfortably off” in the £50,000-£70,000 income bracket.