“But the more conversations I have about happiness, and the more I absorb the idea that there’s a glittering happy ever after out there for the taking, the more I start to overthink the whole thing, compulsively monitoring how I am feeling and hyper-parenting my emotions,” Ruth Whippman, a Brit, writes about life in America for Vox. “The whole process starts to become painfully, comically neurotic. Workaday contentment starts to give way to a low-grade sense of inadequacy when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been reached — a recipe for anxiety.”
