About Me — Sam Wren-Lewis

Happiness expert who has problems with positivity

How I ended up being a writer

I grew up wanting to “save the world” and make everyone happy. Small things. In my early 20s, I came across the science of happiness, and optimistically thought that, if only I told everyone about it then we’d all live happily ever after! So I set out to quickly write a book on happiness.

The first draft of the book wasn’t quite right, so it turned into a PhD in happiness, which then turned into a career in wellbeing and mental health policy, which, eventually turned into an actual book — The Happiness Problem — published by Policy Press in 2019.

Only, by this point, the book was no longer about how to be happy. Nope. I’d become the happiness expert who had problems with positivity. For me, the way we think about happiness is a major part of the problem.

So here I am, 12 years later, trying to write as much as possible on Medium about happiness, social change, and the link between the two. In a nutshell, I believe the problem with happiness (and related topics like self-help, self-improvement, personal growth, productivity, purpose, progress, etc) is we think it comes from control. We think that “if only I had… then I’d be happy.”