Editions

Happy Ever After

  • Imprint: Allen Lane

  • ISBN: 9780241284445

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 222mm x 25mm x 144mm

  • Weight: 361g

  • RRP: £20.00

Happy Ever After

  • Escaping The Myth of The Perfect Life

'Smart, engaging and funny. It will make you question everything you think you know about what you want' Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women

Paul Dolan, the bestselling author of Happiness by Design, shows us how to escape the myth of perfection and find our own route to happiness.

Be ambitious; find everlasting love; look after your health ... There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. These narratives can make our lives easier, and they might sometimes make us happier too. But they can also trap us and those around us.

In Happy Ever After, bestselling happiness expert Professor Paul Dolan draws on a variety of studies ranging over wellbeing, inequality and discrimination to bust the common myths about our sources of happiness. He shows that there can be many unexpected paths to lasting fulfilment. Some of these might involve not going into higher education, choosing not to marry, rewarding acts rooted in self-interest and caring a little less about living forever.

By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we might each find a life worth living.

  • Imprint: Allen Lane

  • ISBN: 9780241284445

  • Length: 240  Pages

  • Dimensions: 222mm x 25mm x 144mm

  • Weight: 361g

  • RRP: £20.00

Reviews

  • Smart, engaging and funny. . . will make you question everything you think you know about what you want

    Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women

  • Passionate, provocative. . . It isn't just a self-help book. It is a manifesto for a better society

    The Times

  • A very useful antidote to the pressures of modern living. Very few books change the way you think about yourself, but this is one of them. I would particularly recommend it to young adults with all these life choices ahead of them

    Tablet

  • One of the most rigorous articulations of the new mood of acceptance... a persuasive demolition of many of our cultural stories about how we ought to live

    Oliver Burkeman, Guardian

  • A timely warning that we need to question standard assumptions about what is good for individuals and society. Dolan makes a compelling case for putting people's own perceptions of their wellbeing at the heart of policy making

    Lord Gus O’Donnell, former Cabinet Secretary

  • Paul Dolan knows what makes people happy - and what doesn't. Happy Ever After is illuminating, wise, even profound. A magnificent achievement

    Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge

  • A smart and irreverent look at the bad advice, lame instructions, and missing ingredients in society's recipe for a happy life

    Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness

  • A splendid demonstration of how conventional aspirations can make us miserable

    Richard Layard, author of Happiness

  • The book that will make you quit your job

    New Statesman

  • Paul Dolan know what makes people happy - and what doesn't. Happy Ever After is illuminating, wise, even profound. A magnificent achievement

    Cass Sunstein, co-author of Nudge

More from this Author

About the Author

Paul Dolan

Paul Dolan is Professor of Behavioural Science at the LSE. He is an internationally renowned expert in human behaviour and happiness. Amongst various other roles, he wrote the questions that are being used to monitor national happiness in the UK and has advised many governments, charities and corporations on how to influence behaviour to improve wellbeing. His debut book, Happiness by Design, was a Sunday Times bestseller and dubbed 'the book that will make you quit your job'.

Paul Dolan

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Features

Stop looking for 'the one': how to escape the myth of a perfect life

In Happy Ever After, Paul Dolan dispels some of the most common myths about what makes us happy. Here are five things you should stop doing in order to escape the myth of perfection, and truly find lasting fulfilment.

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