Happiness is increasingly considered a proper measure of social progress and a goal of public policy. Myriad organisations, from the UN to international think-tanks, rank countries according to their ‘gross national happiness’, as a ‘more human measure’ than gross domestic product (GDP). Happiness as an end has become such an accepted aspect of public life that one of its most high-profile gurus, Sir Anthony Seldon, founder of Action for Happiness, has called his new book Beyond Happiness. While the policy focus on happiness is new, historically most human beings have wanted to know how to live a happy or fulfilled life. Philosophies and religions have tried to answer the question of how we should live a good life. In our own day, bookshops have large sections devoted to ‘personal development’, ‘popular psychology’ or ‘mind, body and spirit’. Books reveal how to achieve effectiveness in business, success in relationships, or just plain happiness.

Is there any evidence that following such advice actually works? And is this a sensible aim in the first place? Might not unpleasant emotions like misery, guilt and fury be perfectly rational reactions to awful realities or wrongdoing? Is being content thanks to ignorance more desirable than unhappiness caused by knowledge of problems in the world, failings in oneself? After all, JS Mill famously warned that is ‘better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’. Some movements in psychotherapy agree with this, and seek only to treat ‘irrational’ anxieties. Indeed, in today’s therapeutic cultural climate, might a preoccupation with one’s own happiness regardless of the world beyond be little more than inward-looking narcissism?

Whatever the difficulties, the idea of human fulfilment – of living lives that are not wasted - is deeply important. The conviction that there is such a thing as a meaningful and fulfilled life, lived with integrity, is common to many religious and non-religious philosophies and ought to have appeal. Whatever misfortunes life throws at you, we hope it is possible to live purposefully and well. But if that is so, how can we find out how to do so? Or is the direct pursuit of happiness doomed to be self-defeating? To whom – if anyone - should we look for advice?