Happiness sounds pretty good. Indeed, there’s plenty of people out there prepared to sell it to us. The $12-billion-a-year industry in self-help books, conferences, and tapes tells us about little changes we can all make to arrive at the elusive happy existence, from visualizing future success to losing weight or cleaning our rooms.

Since the late 1990s, this industry has been backed up with a supposedly scientific counterpart – the “positive psychology” promoted by former American Psychological Association president Martin Seligman. His ideas of “learned optimism,” along with such concepts as “mindfulness,” have become part of common-sense ideas on how to improve our existence.

Some of this talk sounds pretty cultish – and rather like a call to swallow the realities we aren’t very happy about. It suggests that our problems are all in our own heads, as is the path to making ourselves into better people. No wonder it’s increasingly used in workplaces to make us smile along while we do what we’re told.