The new World Happiness Report numbers are in and, for Americans, they’re not pretty. The United States fell from 15th to 23rd place in the international rankings of happiness, with Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden taking the top spots.

The logical questions are being asked: Why do Americans possess unimpressive levels of happiness? What are Scandinavians doing to consistently rank high? Most important, how can we become happier people?

As I showed in my Happiness in America: A Cultural History, the hard truth is that Americans have never been a particularly happy group. Our perpetual search for happiness indicates widespread dissatisfaction and discontent with life in general, making the image of Americans as a happy-go-lucky people more mythology than reality. Our competitive and comparative American Way of Life has not proven to be an especially good formula for happiness, I argue, with external signs of success unlikely to produce appreciably happier people. Rather, happiness has more often come from being in and appreciating the........

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