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My father gave me Dale Carnegie's How to Stop Worrying and Start Living to read as an anxious adolescent. Later I read Norman Vincent Peale. This book mentions how Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking grew out of early Protestantism (Methodism) in the United States and the notion of our having a free will to better ourselves (rather than being passive vessels waiting to be filled with grace). The author asks the question as to whether the development of Positive Psychology, the program at the heart of this book, is just positive thinking "warmed over". He argues that Positive Psychology is "tied to a program of empirical and replicable scientific activity". Of course it is. (His later comment that social science, no matter how sophisticated, never predicts more than 50 per cent of the variance of anything, rather deflates his argument.) He goes on to say that while positivity is linked in many studies with later health, longevity, sociability and success, the balance of the evidence of many studies suggests that in some situations (such as "when an airplane pilot is deciding whether to de-ice the wings of *her* airplane") negative thinking leads to more accuracy and in some situations "we should all be pessimists". Amen to that. This book was published in 2002 and the author briefly mentions the 9/11 terrorist attacks in his End Notes, calling for prevention of future attacks rather than vengeance which he abhors. The attacks, and the 2008 world economic crisis, must have put the skids under his optimistic belief that we're headed towards nirvana since the evolutionary "process that selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence and goodness." All that being said, it appears the way to "authentic happiness" (as opposed to inauthentic happiness, you understand) is largely what the early positive thinkers have always told us: count your blessings, express gratitude, find a calling, money won't buy happiness, forgive others who wrong you ... etc etc. It also helps to have optimism and hope which will cause "better resistance to depression when bad events strike; better performance at work and better physical health." Yes, but ...