Randy Kennedy of The New York Times ponders the complexity of happiness in response to Stefan Sagmeister’s The Happy Show:
“Happiness is not a problem that Mr. Sagmeister has struggled with much personally. On a scale of 1 to 10, he rates himself a provisional 8. But in 2008, during a yearlong sabbatical in Indonesia that he chose to devote mostly to making furniture, he received some blunt feedback from a close friend. ‘He said if I was taking a whole year off, and at the end of it I had only some tables and chairs to show, then it would be pretty skimpy, wouldn’t it?’ Mr. Sagmeister said. ‘And that somehow seemed true, even though I didn’t want to hear it.’
So he started to work instead on an ambitious, unusual feature-length documentary, ‘The Happy Film,’ a kind of delivery vehicle for several years of thinking and reading about the nature of happiness.”