When Happiness Was Invented

The word 'happiness' seems timeless, but according to the Conversable Economist, it's actually a relatively modern invention. Linguistically, the term evolved from the Old Norse 'hap,' meaning luck or fortune—so when medieval English speakers talked about 'happiness,' they really just meant being fortunate. By the mid-1500s, the word picked up entirely new meanings, absorbing the Greek idea of eudaimonia—the fulfillment of one's true self—and the Latin concept of summum bonum, the sovereign good. A striking example: Thomas More's Utopia, first translated to English in 1551, contained no mention of 'happiness' at all. Yet when Gilbert Burnet translated it anew in 1684, he used the word nineteen times. From there, the concept traveled into modern economics through Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism and into the founding documents of the United States. Today, economists measure happiness through surveys and behavioral research, though Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman later cautioned that what people actually want isn't moment-to-moment happiness—it's life satisfaction, the story they tell themselves about how their life has gone.

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