August is the 11th annual Happiness Happens Month, as propagated by the Secret Society of Happy People, an insidious underground cabal devoted to encouraging and spreading happiness.

I know. The nerve.

They're smart to keep their membership and operatives covert, because if there's one thing we can't stand in our proudly stressed-out, sleep-deprived, overworked, overcommitted and heavily medicated juggernaut of a culture, it's a bunch of smiley-faced goofs flaunting their happiness all over the place. Don't they know how screwed up the world is?

Embracing, espousing and practicing happiness is an enormous project, like the D-Day invasion or a 12-step program or renovating a house. There doesn't seem to be enough happiness to go around, judging by the brisk trade in self-help books claiming to contain the treasure map for finding it.

Speaking of maps, there's an online diagram of where in the nation the happiest tweets (from Twitter, not songbirds) come from at various hours of the day (www.ccs.neu.edu/home/amislove/twittermood/).

It seems we're all pretty optimistic in the morning, and then the red shades of gloom hemorrhage across the time zones from east to west until, as night falls, we go home, pet the dog, have a drink and tell ourselves that tomorrow will be better. Which it is. At first.

Who's happy? According to research, college students are less happy than working adults. In fact, a 2009 article in Psychology Today says 15 percent of college students are clinically depressed, despite five to seven years of beer pong and easy credit.

Older and retired people are the happiest age group. Costa Ricans and Danes are the happiest people in the world; Americans are only the 20th, though (because?) we're the world's most productive.

What makes us happy? According, again, to research, it's not our kids, who actually decrease happiness slightly until we're reminiscing. Not our jobs; U.S. job satisfaction has sunk to its lowest level in over two decades. The happiest occupations involve keeping people away from flames: firefighters and clergy.

We've gotten it into our heads that we deserve to be happy, and thousands of books and armies of life coaches stand ready to show us how. Because as behavioral economists are discovering, when it comes right down to it, we don't even reliably know how to do the thing our whole economy is based on: maximize our utility.

In English: We don't know what will make us happy. We think we do, but we're wrong. Most things are neither as bad nor as good as we predict they're going to be. In our own minds, we oversell everything.

A scientific approach to the happiness hunt is fraught with Catch-22s, and I'm not even talking about the dangers of drug use or implants.

Sunshine fills you with happy vitamin D; unfortunately, it also fills you with wrinkles, and sunscreen screens out the D. Similarly, too much caffeine makes you anxious and cranky, but cutting back may make you sleepy and give you a headache, which puts you right back at cranky.

It would be great to accentuate the positive -- but should we really be trying to eliminate the negative? We feel positive emotions more often than negative ones, but the negative ones tend to be stronger. Maybe instead of buying and/or swallowing something to counteract that, we should look for long-term solutions, like learning to deal with grief or harnessing anger.

So many writers, artists and bands produced some of their best work when miserable, then got soft and dull when their personal lives improved. When they stopped suffering for their art, the rest of us started.

Of course you deserve to be happy. But what does that even mean? To never be sad or disappointed? To feel good all the time? To get everything you want?

What do you learn from that?

Real life is full of tragedies and annoyances, and the trick is to experience bad feelings without letting them paralyze you. Bad feelings help you appreciate and pursue ... contentment. Not constant pleasure or wild joy, contentment that transcends daily ups and downs. You know: happiness.

According to the experts, it boils down to this, and I'll tell you free of charge, because I'm an idiot: Get more sleep. Get some exercise. Have friends, and love someone. Have goals and work toward them. Be nice. And pay attention, because this is your life, right here, right now.

The Dalai Lama always seems like a pretty happy guy, and I bet he gives very similar advice. I also learned recently that he really, really likes Tootsie Rolls. So there you have it: mindfulness, health, meaningful work, relationships, generosity, and the occasional Tootsie Roll.

Happy now?

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