The Saad Truth About Happiness

<p>Everyone wants to be happy. The question “How can I be happy?” drives countless decisions across the world, and billions of dollars are spent on marketing a wide variety of answers to it. Increasing evidence shows, however, that <em>unhappiness</em> is on the rise.</p> <p>Already known to an audience of hundreds of thousands as “the therapist for everyone,” Dr. Saad contends that happiness is not merely a changeable mood, but a process toward which all people can strive by following basic steps known to humans for millennia; happiness can be measured and assessed, and strategies devised to achieve it.</p> <p>Drawing on scientific studies, the wisdom of ancient philosophy and religion, and his extraordinary personal experience as a refugee from war-torn Lebanon, Gad offers a provocative, helpful, and entertaining treatise on how to strive for happiness, win it, and keep it.</p> <p>Gad Saad, PhD, one of the best-known public intellectuals fighting the tyranny of political correctness, is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, where he held the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption from 2008 to 2018. A pioneer in the application of evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, he is the author of <em>The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption</em>, <em>The Consuming Instinct</em>, and numerous scientific papers and the editor of the book <em>Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences</em>. His previous bestselling popular trade book is <em>The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense</em>. His new book is <em>The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life</em>.</p> <p>Shermer and Saad discuss: operational definitions of the “good life,” “happiness,” and “well being” • emotions • eudaimonia (the pursuit of meaning) versus hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) • genetics and heritability • cultural components • the Big Five (OCEAN) • marriage (mate selection) • health • exercise and stress