When we think about our ‘happiness’ we may think about the goals we have achieved, how much money we have in the bank, or how prestigious our job is. We may not think about our commute to work, our dreary co-workers or the fact that days at the office seem to drag along uninspiringly. In doing so, Dolan argues, we privilege our evaluative self over the experiential self (Kahneman & Riis, 2005). And this goes a long way in making us less happy than we could be.

The tension between these two selves—the evaluative and the experiential—lies at the heart of Happiness by Design. In these pages, Dolan, a self-described ‘sentimental hedonist,’ steps up to advocate for the experiential self. A self, he argues, that often does not have a voice.

In 2004–2005, Dolan took up an invitation from Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman to be a Visiting Research Scholar at Princeton; a decision, he says, that set him on the path of subjective wellbeing research. Originally trained as an economist, Dolan has worked in the UK office for National Statistics and the UK Government’s Behavioural Insights team—also known as the ‘nudge’ unit—and currently holds a Chair in Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.