If you're looking for an answer to "How can I be happy?" then the response from the experts is, "You're asking the wrong question." The better question is why our idea of happiness is so screwed up that most of us wouldn't recognize the real thing if we saw it. Well ...

Our two favorite subjects at Cracked are the elusive concept of human happiness and Batman . This article is about the first one.

5 What We're Calling Happiness is a Recent Invention

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This should blow your mind: The entire concept that you can become happy via some action you can take is a relatively recent invention. And the concept that a person should be happy, and that anything else is the result of some unusual breakdown in the system, is extremely recent.

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"I'd define happiness as less than four types of lice on my body."

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Now, before everyone digs out their old goth clothes and screams, "Aha! We told you that the world was just an endless black ocean of suffering!" that's actually the opposite of the point we're making. It appears that the reason so many people profess to be miserable is specifically because they think they're missing out on some magical emotion that "happy" people feel all the time. They're tormenting themselves over the loss of something that nobody actually has, because that thing doesn't even have a definition.

See, the thing is that humans have never actually settled on what "happiness" is. A historian named Darrin McMahon exhaustively studied how happiness has been viewed over the last few thousand years and found that it was constantly changing.

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"I'd say I define happiness as less than three types of lice on my body."

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Go back to ancient Greece and it's very simple: Happiness = Luck. Either the gods dribbled their joy juice on you or didn't; either way, there was nothing you could do about it. And that was it, end of conversation. It was nothing to get upset about. In fact, in every European language, the root of the word for happiness is some older word that meant "luck." Ours comes from the old Norse and Old English word "hap", and hap simply means "luck."