The quest for life’s purpose

A few years back, when I set out to write a book about the modern happiness industry, I decided I first ought to try to come up with a working definition of ‘happiness’. After all, you wouldn’t write a book about the politics of modern Croatia, or the history of the sandwich, without a rough notion of where Croatia was, or what counts as a sandwich, would you? And so I strode off to the library, expecting the project to take a week at most. (Apparently, it didn’t occur to me that philosophers had already spent more than two millennia addressing the question, with decidedly limited success.) Four days and one continuous existential meltdown later, I admitted defeat. The more closely I scrutinised