What's the secret to happiness? Your attitude

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What makes it even tougher is there are lots of forces out there preaching you're not responsible. Our consumption-based economy and perfection-obsessed mass culture offer countless keys to happiness. Slim down following the latest diet and bulk up using the newest fitness regime or piece of equipment and you'll be happy. If those don't work, have plastic surgery or take steroids. After all, the stars do it and they're happy. You'll feel good about yourself if you read the right books and, better yet, read them as part of the right reading group. You've got to see the hit play or have front-row seats to the hot concert tour to be happy. If your kids go the right preschool, then the right private school, and finally the right Ivy League university, you'll be happy. To feel good, you need to make a great salary ... but only by doing a job that offers spiritual rewards. Then use that money to buy the smallest MP3 player and the largest flat-screen television, both of which can be controlled by the remote on the dashboard of that car you need to have. If you're single, that car has to be a quirky import that fits your originality ... as well as everyone else's individuality. If you're married with kids, it needs to be an armored leviathan capable of transporting a junior high soccer team through Baghdad in safety. That will bring you joy. The right shoes, the right haircut, the right scent, will make you happy. And after buying all that, make sure you've invested all the rest in hedge funds so you can retire at fifty to become a social worker in a developing country.

It's not just the media and commerce that are telling up happiness will come from what we do. Clergy preach you've got to come back to the church to find God. Parents tell us we need to go to a certain college. Our friends who are married tell us we too need to get married. Our siblings who start families tell us we have to do the same, or else we'll never learn what really matters. Every day, in hundreds if not thousands of ways, we're told happiness is available out there, if we just buy or do something.

The Fruitless Pursuit of Happiness
Is it any wonder, then, that many of us have, consciously or not, turned our lives into quests for happiness? We may jump from job to job, maybe even spouse to spouse, looking for fulfillment. We might change locations and hairstyles. Perhaps we repeatedly buy the latest electronic toy and the newest diet book. We may obsess about building up our portfolios and biceps. But the quest always ends in failure. “The search for happiness,” wrote the author D. H. Lawrence, “always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.” The philosopher Albert Camus put it in even blunter terms: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

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Yet we keep on searching, despite, and perhaps because of, our continuing unhappiness. We keep on banging our heads against the wall. We think happiness must be just around the corner, in our next office, at the party on Friday night, with the ...

Excerpted from “It's All in Your Head: Thinking Your Way to Happiness” by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine. Copyright © 2006, Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine. All rights reserved. Published by HarperCollins Publishers. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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What's the secret to happiness? Your attitude