Happy Never After: Why the Happiness Fairytale is Driving us Mad (and How I Flipped the Script)

What if all the things you'd been told would make you happy were red herrings?

Jill Stark was living the dream. And then it all fell apart. It forced her to ask if she'd been sold a lie. From the ashes of Jill's epic breakdown and through her own battles with mental-health issues comes this raw, funny, and uplifting exploration of our age of anxiety. Why, she asks, in a western world with more opportunity, choice, and wealth than ever before, are so many of us depressed, anxious, and medicated? When we've never had more ways to connect, why do we feel so profoundly disconnected? And could it be that our relentless pursuit of happiness is making us miserable?

Road-testing neuroscience's latest psychological frontiers in compassion, acceptance, gratitude, play, hope and solitude, Jill turns the happiness fairytale on its head. What would happen if we stopped chasing, stayed still, and found calm and meaning in places we least expected?

“A brilliant intersection between searing personal experience and the wisdom of the elders” HUGH MACKAY, author of The Good Life