Two hundred years ago, the British political philosopher John Stuart Mill suggested a subversive approach to self-help. It’s an approach that has much in common with the growing community of happiness hackers. Mill argued that while happiness might be our primary goal, we can’t pursue it directly. It’s too tricky, too hard to pin down, too easy to scare off. So we have to set other, more concrete goals, and in the pursuit of those goals, we capture happiness as a kind of by-product. He called this approaching happiness “sideways, like a crab.”30 We can’t let it know we’re coming. We just kind
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