Americans prioritize happiness so much that we wrote the pursuit of it into our founding documents, then proceeded to write over thirty thousand books on the subject, as per a recent Amazon search. Were taught from a very young age to scorn our own tears (Crybaby!), then to censure our sorrow for the rest of our lives. In a study of more than seventy thousand people, Harvard psychologist Dr. Susan David found that one-third of us judge ourselves for having negative emotions such as sadness and grief.

Bittersweet by Susan Cain