Course overview

What the course is and isn't, what it will cost you, and the twelve-item self-test you take before you know any of the answers.

Set up the journal, walk the seven-module arc, and write Version 1 of your Definition Ledger.

The driving question, your gut answer, and how every lesson in this course is built.

Honest hedonism, subjective well-being, and the first crack in the feeling-theory.

Lottery winners, adaptation, and why every gain keeps fading back toward where you started.

Nozick's Experience Machine: would you plug in for the rest of your life — and what does your hesitation mean?

The luck buried inside the word happiness itself, and the sage who refused to call the richest king alive happy.

The driving question, your gut answer, and the four therapies this module puts side by side.

Eudaimonia as trained activity: happiness as fitness, not weather.

Two ancient clinics for the same disorder — wanting badly — and what each actually prescribed.

Drop out of society, or weave yourself into it? Two opposite answers, both defensible.

Craving as the diagnosis, the second arrow, and a therapy that starts by naming the problem precisely.

The driving question, your gut answer, and how to read four traditions honestly whatever you believe.

Ecclesiastes' vapor, commanded joy, and the weekly rest that legislates happiness into the calendar.

The Beatitudes' inversion and Augustine's restless heart: happiness relocated past the grave, then handed back to this life.

Al-Ghazali walks away from the best job in the Islamic world, and describes the heart as a mirror worth polishing.

Ranked life-goals, karma yoga, and an honest comparison of what the traditions do and don't agree on.

The driving question, your gut answer, and the four turns that made happiness modern.

Montaigne, his cat, and the invention of belonging to yourself.

How happiness stopped being a reward for the next life and became a right worth pursuing in this one.

Bentham's calculus, Mill's breakdown at twenty, and the byproduct thesis that came out of it.

The smiley face, the self-help shelf, and the moment happiness became a national statistic.

The driving question, your gut answer, and how to read a happiness study without being had.

How well-being is measured, what the instruments miss, and the state you can't feel while you're in it.

Money and happiness: fifty years of correcting the number, including the one everybody quotes.

The experiencing self, the remembering self, and how badly you forecast your own feelings.

Relationships, gratitude, sleep, movement — and the honest effect sizes behind each.

The driving question, your gut answer, and the five ways the pursuit turns on itself.

The evidence that valuing happiness more can leave you with less of it.

What sadness, anger and grief are for — and what it costs to delete them.

Social comparison, influencers, and what the evidence on the feed honestly supports.

Ubuntu, shared meals, and the traditions that never treated happiness as a private project.

Who profits from your wellness, what adaptive preferences hide, and where happiness becomes a question of justice.

The driving question, your gut answer, and what the capstone will ask of you.

Pleasure, satisfaction, flourishing, meaning — four different things one word has been carrying all along.

The trades you refuse are the clearest map of what you actually value.

Write your own philosophy of happiness, then retake the self-test against the full answer key.

Design, pre-register and run a two-to-four-week experiment on your own life.

Every key term in the course, defined in plain language and pointed back at the lesson it came from.

The arc-line, from Solon's warning to the World Happiness Report: luck to virtue to salvation to a right to a feeling to a metric.

An annotated list sorted by strand — history, philosophy and the traditions, and the science.