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The Mirage Of Happiness: Why Joy Keeps Slipping Away
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 2 2026
Pages: 146
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.31 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
When I get the promotion, I'll be happy. Once I find the right person, everything will fall into place. As soon as I have enough money, I can finally relax.
You have said a version of this. So has almost everyone. And yet, somehow, the happiness never quite arrives the way it was supposed to.
In The Mirage of Happiness, writer and philosopher Pema Dorje dismantles one of the most deeply held assumptions of modern life: that happiness is a destination you reach by acquiring the right things, achieving the right goals, or arranging your circumstances correctly. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, ancient philosophy, and his own experience of profound personal loss, Pema Dorje reveals why this assumption is not just wrong but actively working against you.
Inside, you will discover:
- Why the hedonic treadmill means every gain you make will eventually feel like nothing, and what to do instead
- The arrival fallacy: why reaching your goals leaves you emptier than you expected
- How social media has replaced your inner compass with someone else's highlight reel
- Why chasing happiness directly is one of the most reliable ways to push it further away
- What Epicurus, the Buddha, Viktor Frankl, and two thousand years of philosophy actually say about lasting contentment
- The difference between a life that looks happy from the outside and one that actually feels like yours from the inside
- How to reconnect with the aspirations that are genuinely yours, not the ones the world chose for you
This is not a book of morning routines or five-step frameworks. It is an honest, deeply human examination of why happiness keeps slipping, written by someone who lost nearly everything and had to build his understanding of joy from the ground up.
The mirage is not happiness itself. It is the version of it you have been chasing.
The real thing is closer than you think. And it is nothing like what you were told to expect.
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