How happiness became mandatory—and why we should reject the demand to "be happy"

Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion—one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn't yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment—the right to pursue happiness—become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy—and what might we do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness.

Gripped by the twin illusions that we are responsible for being happy or unhappy and that happiness can be produced by effort, many of us are now martyring ourselves—sacrificing our time, fortunes, health, and peace of mind—in the hope of entering an earthly paradise. Much better, Bruckner argues, would be to accept that happiness is an unbidden and fragile gift that arrives only by grace and luck.

A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness, Perpetual Euphoria is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to "be happy."

"As an essayist in the tradition of Kundera and Montaigne, Bruckner has a bracing knack of distilling the attitudes of the contemporary moment and helping us appraise them anew." - The Age

"Perpetual Euphoria is a beautiful essay. Lively, corrosive, brilliant.... Woven from pure emotion." - Le Journal du Dimanche

"A writer who has inherited the mantle of the French moralists' grand tradition." - Le Monde

"Pascal Bruckner's essay is a subtle attack, both scholarly and ironic, against the new obligation of being happy." - La Croix

"This exciting book explores the vicious paradox that the Enlightenment has left: one is obligated to find happiness and punish oneself if one fails to do so. . . . This book is fun to read." - Choice

"This lively and acerbic exploration of happiness attacks the assumption that we somehow have a duty to be happy, that to fail to achieve happiness is in effect to fail as a human being, and offers the intriguing alternative view that an interesting but difficult life has more value than a comfortable but trivial one." - Good Book Guide