Happiness - Hanno Beck, Aloys Prinz

Hanno Beck is an editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and, since 2006, a professor at Pforzheim University, in Germany. He won the Deutscher Finanzbuchpreis. Aloys Prinz is a professor of economics at Westflische Wilhelms Universitt in Münster, Germany, and winner of the same Deutscher Finanzbuchpreis.
What is happiness, really? Can it be measured? Can it be bought? Can it be predicted? Can it be inherited? But can it be attracted? Can it be regulated, dosed, or custom-ordered?
"Everyone wants to live on top of a mountain, without knowing that true happiness lies in the way you climb the steep slopes to the top." - GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
"Happiness is something that comes into your life through a door you don't remember leaving open." - ROSE LANE
Fast happy? Do you like fast food? What do Ray Kroc, John Pemberton and Harland Sanders have in common? Very simple: calories and age. Kroc founded McDonalds, the hamburger empire, when he was 52. John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, the brown and sticky juice, at 55. Sanders founded the fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken, at 65. An age when others are preoccupied with retirement, grandchildren and pensions, these three men have laid the foundations of empires.
How much happiness can you resist? Not too much, rest assured! Why? The answer is simple and you've probably guessed it: happiness numbs you. If the first jump from the three-meter trampoline is unforgettable, the hundredth one becomes completely unimportant. No matter what we do - with each repetition, the feeling of happiness decreases, because habit sets in. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill, the death of happiness.