So What's a Happy Life, Anyway

let's just figure this out right now

In my upcoming position as Resident Okayness Scholar at the Alembic in Berkeley, I’m going to have to get used to making statements about human happiness and what makes people happy. The prospect makes me a little nervous—to make such statements, I should have some concrete idea of what a happy life looks like, and I don’t know that I’ve ever actually tried to answer this question definitively. Why not do it today?