even if you can’t buy it, happiness is big business...

( abridged )

The stock market has been on a roller coaster, banks are going under, unemployment is skyrocketing, and foreclosed homes pepper the landscape. What better time for a happiness conference?

The two-day gathering...knitted together many currents in the cultural ether: positive psychology, neuroplasticity, mindfulness-based stress reduction, the role of emotional support in cancer and the yogic ideal of “being in the present moment.”

...a growing number of studies over the past decade have suggested that money does not equal happiness, among them one concluding that the Inuit of northern Greenland and the Masai in Kenya were just as happy as members of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.

Nevertheless, a few renegades at the conference suggested that happiness was overrated. “Unhappiness about not being happy is a modern condition,” said Darrin M. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University. “We cannot feel good all the time, nor should we.”

Yet the national embrace of “Yes We Can” hung in the air. “We’ve had a period of borrowing money, personal gratification, consumption and self-interest,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a director of the Greater Good Science Center. “Now we will have a president who is talking about sacrifice.”

“Human beings are wired to care and give,” Dr. Keltner added, “and it’s probably our best route to happiness.” // patricia leigh brown, 11.26.08, new york times