The Saad Truth About Happiness
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Everyone wants to be happy. The question \\u201cHow can I be happy?\\u201d drives countless decisions across the world, and billions of dollars are spent on marketing a wide variety of answers to it. Increasing evidence shows, however, that unhappiness is on the rise.
Already known to an audience of hundreds of thousands as \\u201cthe therapist for everyone,\\u201d Dr. Saad contends that happiness is not merely a changeable mood, but a process toward which all people can strive by following basic steps known to humans for millennia; happiness can be measured and assessed, and strategies devised to achieve it.
Drawing on scientific studies, the wisdom of ancient philosophy and religion, and his extraordinary personal experience as a refugee from war-torn Lebanon, Gad offers a provocative, helpful, and entertaining treatise on how to strive for happiness, win it, and keep it.
Gad Saad, PhD, one of the best-known public intellectuals fighting the tyranny of political correctness, is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, where he held the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption from 2008 to 2018. A pioneer in the application of evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, he is the author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, The Consuming Instinct, and numerous scientific papers and the editor of the book Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. His previous bestselling popular trade book is The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His new book is The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life.
Shermer and Saad discuss: operational definitions of the \\u201cgood life,\\u201d \\u201chappiness,\\u201d and \\u201cwell being\\u201d \\u2022 emotions \\u2022 eudaimonia (the pursuit of meaning) versus hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) \\u2022\\xa0genetics and heritability \\u2022 cultural components \\u2022 the Big Five (OCEAN) \\u2022 marriage (mate selection) \\u2022\\xa0health \\u2022 exercise and stress reduction \\u2022\\xa0religion \\u2022 anti-fragility \\u2022 a playful outlook and curiosity \\u2022 variety (the \\u201cspice of life\\u201d) \\u2022 what the ancient Greeks got right about living the good life \\u2022 how failure may actually be a key to more happiness \\u2022 persistence, grit, and risk taking \\u2022\\xa0regret and the dark side of consumption and addictions.
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