This month’s book club read was Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat, a book that asks whether happiness can be approached like an engineering problem: identify the inputs, understand the system, and develop a methodology for producing a better outcome.
It was a strong premise for a bunch of techies. It was also a surprisingly divisive book for our group.
I enjoyed Solve for Happy, although I found it difficult in places. The story of Gawdat’s son Ali and his death was heartbreaking, and as a parent I found some of Gawdat’s attempts to reason his way through that loss very difficult to hear. I could understand that this framework was part of how he survived and ultimately found meaning, but there were moments when the attempt to intellectually explain grief felt uncomfortable. That tension for me was pretty consistent amongst our book club members, although to varying degrees.
Several of us were hooked by the beginning of the book. The person who had originally recommended this book, admitted that he was initially excited by the first 40 pages but ultimately felt disappointed. His take was that the book essentially boiled down to managing our expectations so they align with reality—an idea that didn’t seem particularly revolutionary.
Others had a similar reaction. That the book started with real momentum, particularly because of the rawness of Gawdat’s experience with the loss of his son, but felt that it fizzled out in the middle. The experience was almost like a “sugar crash”: a powerful beginning followed by a long stretch that didn’t deliver on the promise.
The disappointment stemmed from a deeply tactical, almost PowerPoint-like approach to happiness. And that was some of the inherent disconnect: the book promised an engineering solution to happiness, but where was the engineering? Gawdat gives equations, frameworks, truths, and rules, but several people felt that he never actually developed the rigorous methodology that the premise seemed to promise.
His grief was probably the most emotionally complicated part of our discussion. Gawdat’s philosophy is ultimately tested against the death of his son. His argument is that we can find happiness again even after profound tragedy by changing our relationship with reality. I found that idea both beautiful and fantastical.
One of our book club members brought an especially powerful perspective to the conversation, having lost a child himself many years ago. He found some of Gawdat’s framing of child loss unrealistic, particularly the suggestion that a child dying “at the right time” could ultimately bring peace. That idea clearly did not resonate with his experience of grief.
He made an important distinction: over time, hearing his lost child’s name can eventually bring joy rather than pain. But that isn’t necessarily the same thing as deciding that the loss itself was somehow right, necessary, or part of a larger equation that can be solved.
That distinction stayed with me. There is a difference between accepting reality and approving of reality. We can accept that something happened without believing it should have happened. We can learn to live with something without believing that it was fair. And we can eventually experience happiness again without deciding that the tragedy itself was somehow a gift. That was one of the many feelings I had reading the book that was a counterpoint to Gawdat’s framework.
Gawdat’s central idea is essentially that happiness comes from the relationship between reality and our expectations of reality. When reality exceeds our expectations, we are happy. When reality falls short of them, we suffer. There is something undeniably useful here.
I have found versions of this idea throughout Buddhist philosophy and in The Book of Joy: much of our suffering comes from our attachment to how we think things should be rather than our ability to accept how they actually are.
Several of us questioned whether Gawdat was really offering anything new with this insight. Many of the concepts felt borrowed from existing philosophical and religious traditions. The idea that “you are not your thoughts,” for example, is hardly new and has deep roots in Eastern philosophy, including Advaita.
Others challenged Gawdat’s distinction between our inner dialogue and our “self.” We did not agree with his framing of “the voice in your head is not you”, but of course the practice of questioning one’s own thoughts and beliefs rather than automatically accepting them as truth is important. Even if the philosophy isn’t original, the practice can still be useful.
The part of the book I liked the most was the concept of the Five Ultimate Truths. This is a framework for grounding ourselves in reality rather than constantly trying to bend reality to our expectations.
The broader message is that life changes, death is inevitable, the past cannot be changed, our thoughts aren’t necessarily facts, and we don’t control everything that happens to us. The concept I particularly appreciated was the idea of accepting reality rather than engaging in the Sisyphean task of trying to continually change reality into what we think it should be.
There is enormous energy wasted fighting things that have already happened or worrying about things we cannot control. The more useful question is what is actually happening right now, and what story am I telling myself about it? That reminded me strongly of The Book of Joy.
Both books ultimately circle around similar Buddhist ideas: suffering is intensified by unmet expectations, attachment, worry, and our inability to remain present. The difference is that Gawdat packages these concepts as an engineering problem, while Buddhist philosophy has been wrestling with essentially the same questions for thousands of years.
The final section of the book generated some of the most interesting intellectual discussion. Gawdat moves from happiness into questions about the universe, evolution, and God. His intelligent-design argument is based largely on the extraordinary complexity and apparent improbability of life. I found this section fascinating—even though I didn’t find the argument all that convincing.
His reasoning around the improbability of macroevolution makes it plausible to consider an underlying intelligence or creator. But I don’t think demonstrating that one explanation is difficult to accept automatically proves another explanation.
There could be other mechanisms or explanations that we don’t yet fully understand. In other words: “I don’t think this could have happened randomly” doesn’t necessarily equal “therefore, God did it.”
That was my biggest issue with this section. One of our attendees took the critique even further, pointing out that the book seemed to apply standards of falsifiability selectively. The book questions assumptions about suffering and happiness but then appears to exempt some of its own ultimate conclusions from the same scrutiny.
That led to a broader conversation about the “God of the gaps” idea—the tendency to use God as an explanation for things we don’t currently understand. Others also explored patterns in nature and emergent complexity: structures such as termite mounds and connections to Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, raising the fascinating question of how complex patterns can emerge without a central designer. It’s one of those questions where the more you learn, the less satisfying simple answers become.
A different member brought his perspective to the discussion by introducing the Vedic concepts of Sat, Chit, and Ananda. Ananda, or bliss/happiness, was particularly interesting because it frames happiness not as something we need to acquire or manufacture, but as an inherent state of being.
That idea flips Gawdat’s entire premise on its head. Rather than asking, “how do I solve for happiness?” the question becomes,”what is getting in the way of the happiness that is already there?”
That felt much closer to the philosophical traditions that Gawdat was drawing from, and it raised the question of whether the book’s “engineering” approach was actually necessary.
One of the strongest critiques came from a member who generally dislikes self-help books and felt particularly uncomfortable with the way Gawdat used his son’s death as the foundation for his philosophy. The concern was that the book could inadvertently turn tragedy into a kind of user error: if you are unhappy, perhaps you aren’t applying the methodology correctly. He finds that conclusion dangerous.
There are circumstances where no amount of changing your expectations, thoughts, or attitude should be presented as a solution to the underlying problem. Serious illness, death, trauma, and profound injustice aren’t necessarily problems caused by an individual’s failure to think correctly.
This was the most important criticism of the book for me. The idea that we have agency over our response to suffering is empowering. The idea that our suffering is fundamentally the result of using the wrong mental methodology is much more problematic.
Despite all of the criticism, and there was plenty I still enjoyed the book likely because I enjoyed discussing it. I didn’t need it to be philosophically original for it to be useful. The Five Ultimate Truths resonated with me. The reminder to return to the present resonated with me. The idea that we can separate what actually happened from the story we tell ourselves about what happened resonated with me. And I appreciated the book as reinforcement of ideas I’ve encountered elsewhere, particularly in The Book of Joy and Buddhist philosophy.
Where I struggled was with the implication that something as enormous and complicated as happiness could really be reduced to an equation. Happiness isn’t something we can solve. Happiness is something we practice. Maybe it’s something we notice. Maybe it emerges when we stop spending quite so much energy demanding that reality be different from what it is.
I don’t think we can solve for happiness, but I do believe we have more influence over our experience of reality than we believe.