The Happiness Hypothesis

I feel like I've read pretty much everything from the past few years that falls into this positive psychology category -- Stumbling on Happiness, The Paradox of Choice, The Progress Paradox, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, Flow.  The Progress Paradox (Gregg Easterbrook) is excellent.  This one I just read, The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, is excellent too, and laps the field.  You can read this one and skip all the other ones, except Easterbrook's, which doesn't really overlap with this all that much.  Easterbrook's is about happiness and satisfaction in the world generally and Haidt's is about happiness on the individual level, finding fulfillment and meaning, stuff like that.  Stumbling on Happiness has been getting a lot more press than this one, but this one's just a much better book.  Haidt explains scientific studies really well -- concise but not dumbed-down -- and the first two-thirds of this book are really very engaging.  The last third, which gets more spiritual, didn't hold my interest as much, but, really, most of what I thought while reading this was that it does what Stumbling On Happiness tries to do, but much better.  I feel like I probably read too much about how to find meaning in life, as opposed to actually taking positive action to find meaning in life, but if you want to read about this stuff, you can't do much better in the bookstore than this one.