Finally the pursuit of happiness has become the dominant force in history.
After its birth in the early Enlightenment it languished for hundreds of years, consigned to the nooks and crannies of modern societies and modern lives. It wrote stories instead of histories, writing between the lines of the upheavals those other pursuits, of freedom and of wealth, wrought. But now its time has come. Freud of course and even more so the hysterical women of Vienna that persistently insisted, were the heralds of its coming age. It arrived hidden in plain sight in the roaring and selfdeluding and destined to fail sixties. It is its true inheritance. The postwar babyboom generation was the first generation in the history of the world that actively and with forethought and stubbornly pursued happiness, the first generation that tried to maximize happiness over a lifetime. Every generation since has persevered in this endeavor, has aimed to learn from the mistakes, has worked to change the social arrangements to make them yield more. The pursuit of happiness is changing the world for real.