A HAPPINESS REVOLUTION

The concept of happiness as an achievable goal, something we can deliberately cultivate through practice and effort, is fundamental to the Buddhist view of happiness. In fact, the idea of training the mind has been the cornerstone of Buddhist practice for millennia. Coincidentally, shortly after the publication of The Art of Happiness, this same idea began to take root in society from another direction—as a “new” scientific discovery—leading to a fundamental shift in many people’s perception of happiness. When I first began work on The Art of Happiness in the early 1990s, I discovered that there were relatively few scientific studies on happiness and positive emotions. These were not popular subjects for research. Although at the time there were a handful of researchers studying human happiness and positive emotions, they were the mavericks. But then, suddenly, human happiness started to become a subject of intense interest to the scientific community and the general public alike, as people began to abandon their previous notions of happiness as elusive, mysterious, and unpredictable, replacing that view with the perception of happiness as something that could be scientifically investigated. And over the past decade, as more and more people have rejected the idea of happiness as something that is merely a by-product of our external circumstances, in favor of seeing happiness as something that can be systematically developed, we have witnessed the exponential growth of a new movement—a Happiness Revolution. The watershed event for this new movement was the formal establishment of a new field of psychology involving the study of human happiness. The formal birth of this new branch of psychology took place in 1998, when a highly influential psychologist, Dr. Martin Seligman, the newly elected president of the American Psychological Association, decided to dedicate his term as president to the establishment of this new field, which he dubbed “positive psychology.” Pointing out that for the past half century clinical psychology had focused exclusively on mental illness, human weakness, and dysfunction, he called on his colleagues to expand the scope of psychology to include the study of positive emotions, human strengths, and “what makes life worth living.” Seligman teamed up with another brilliant researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to lay the groundwork for this new field. They were soon joined by a core group of top researchers from universities in America and Europe, and positive psychology took off with tremendous momentum. For the first time in human history, happiness had finally become a legitimate field of scientific inquiry. Since that time, the Happiness Revolution has had a growing impact on all levels of society. Feature stories on happiness have inundated the popular media, while academic courses on positive psychology have been cropping up on college campuses across the United States and throughout the world. At Harvard University, for instance, “The Happiness Course” has now replaced Introductory Economics as the most popular undergraduate course, with enrollment quickly soaring to well over 1,400 students each semester. The impact is even being seen on the governmental level in nations around the world, with the country of Bhutan, for instance, replacing GDP with GNH (Gross National Happiness) as its most important measure of success as a nation. Policymakers in many nations are now even exploring the idea of shaping public policy based on happiness research. As one government official in Scotland exuberantly asserted, “If we can embrace this new science of positive psychology, we have the opportunity to create a new Enlightenment.”