Reasonably good for most of it then dissolved into a pseudoscience non-proof of the existence of God and support of so-called intelligent design. Without that I'd say the book was a solid 4 but that last but alone would've been a 1. ( )

Great cheerful book

Other than being a book on happiness. This book was a memorial to his late son, Ali. Rest in peace Ali! ( )

‘There is no good and there is no bad. You are unimportant. Horrific trauma is simply a negative viewpoint. With the exception of feeling pain, no one ever suffers. Strive for wilful ignorance. How to be happy? JUST be happy.’
The author cherry picks bits of information, twists them out of context, builds tenuous relationships between those bits and then calls them unshakable facts that support his narrative.
I was both bored and annoyed by page 50 but kept going, thinking as it’s an international bestseller, it must get better. It didn’t. Waste of time, waste of money, waste of space. Would not recommend. ( )

Oddly insightful and uplifting from a story that is heartbreaking and relatable. ( )

Mo Gawdat has an overall approach to maintaining a state of equanimous happiness through the many sorts of ups and downs of life that has a lot in common with Buddhism and Stoicism and which I think might be helpful to many. However, his approach to presenting his "happiness equation" to achieve this state is truly terrible and severely undermines the message and his credibility to deliver it.

His introduction, largely built around the story of his son's tragic unexpected death, is, to me, the best part of the book: a touching story of context and motivation that might be worth a read by itself. And the next couple of chapters (part one), setting up some terms and concepts, aren't bad.

But almost immediately into part two, his outline of the "grand illusions" that confuse us all on what we are and what happiness is, his approach starts to collapse for me. Misrepresenting the context and meaning of Rene Descarte's most famous quote to use as a strawman that he can "correct" to make his point was disingenuous, at the least. Many of his examples attempting to distinguish the self from the brain, mind, voice and other traits (e.g., your voice recorded and played back to you doesn't sound like you to you, so the voice clearly isn't you) sometimes border on the ridiculous and flout the reader's ability to think critically at all.

To be fair, there are some good ideas in there. And even some good points—that one's expectations significantly affect one's happiness with outcomes, that ruminating on past events unnecessarily eats away at happiness, etc.—but nothing I haven't read and heard elsewhere and with much better exemplification.

Also, to be fair, I only made it 35% of the way through the book before I couldn't take it anymore and stopped. (And I'm generally pretty stubborn about finishing any book I start.) Maybe it gets better later on. But I'm just not a fast enough reader to complete the rest without spending significant-to-me time doing so, and my confidence that the remaining read would be anywhere near worth the time was completely blown.

I suspect that, if Mo took his touching introduction and most of the first two chapters, and then replaced each the remaining twelve chapters with just a couple sentences stating its main point and no more than a few paragraphs directly explaining it, he'd have a pretty good (if much shorter) book. But, as it is, the book definitely does not solve for my happy at all. ( )