When contemporary empirical social scientists investigate happiness,

they typically try to track people's satisfaction with how life is going.

When we try to determine whether our friends or family members are happy,

we look to things like whether they seem to be enjoying what they're doing,

whether they seem cheerful, whether they like where they live or work, whether they look

stressed, be draggled, annoyed, bored, or in some other way, well, you know, unhappy.

Happiness, on any ordinary understanding of the term

looks to be a subjective matter. It's about the individuals and how they feel. Ordinarily, it would

be very odd for even one's closest and dearest friends to insist that one is happy when one claims to be miserable.

There are exceptions, of course. There are people who never seem to be content unless they can tell

you that they can't sleep or that they're afflicted by strange pains or that they're aggrieved in some other way.

No matter how often we express sympathy for those who seem always to see only what's wrong in their lives,

it's hard not to notice that they seem to be enjoying the litany of complaint.

Now, I have never said this directly to such a person, but I have seen such a person become alarmed

when noticing that he had nothing to complain about

and not really relax again until he had a new problem to discuss.

But notice that even if you're faced with someone who seems deterrent relax again until he had a new problem to discuss.

But notice that even if you're faced with someone who seems determined to be ill at ease,

his pleasure seems to hinge upon her own dissatisfaction or worse on other people's suffering.

In trying to gauge happiness, you're normally trying to measure how individuals think that their own lives are going. Now wasn't always that way. One ancient Greek

commonplace had it that one could assess a man's happiness, only assess it once he had died, since any measure

of happiness taken while he was alive and thriving could mislead. I mean, he might lose

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