“Why Being Happy Matters” presents interviews with people in the U.S., Canada, Asia, Europe and Australia, each of whom reveal to the author what happiness means to them and why it matters. That is the premise behind this book. The title is a bit deceiving to me as it doesn't really talk about why happiness matters, as much as what makes you happy, how to be happy and then how it changes your life and outlook. Interviewees range from PhDs, teachers, professors, bloggers, authors, business persons and just normal everyday people. According to Jennings, Happiness is blooming all over the world, yet in the United States, we find an extremely low happiness index. He sets out to find out what makes people happy. I found parts of this book extremely interesting and inspirational, but other parts monotonous and dry. He included 37 different interviews, which to me was a few too many, but who to leave out is a difficult decision. One theme that resonated with most interviewees is that money does not necessarily make you happy, but having enough to feel secure to provide, food, shelter, healthcare and needs for your family will help people begin to move toward happiness. I am not going to reiterate the themes as there are many, but I do think this is a worthwhile read and you can be selective and skip interviews that don't call to you.

I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. This wasn't what I expected it to be and I did not read the entire book as there were far too many interviews in my opinion.

This was a great book in theory, but there were far too many interviews and it is hard to believe that everyone that was interviewed would have similar opinions.

I really enjoyed this boo, it put life into perspective in its entirety, there is more to life that material things and money. A really inspiring and motivation read. excellent thanks for the ARC.

There is certainly interesting information here, but the interview after interview (37 in total) format got long. Take out the quotes and there is not much more to this book. As I was reading, I found it hard to believe that every person quoted had the same linguistic stylings. Maybe, even though each sentence had quotes around it, they weren’t EXACTLY quotes? Maybe. They just sounded similar in that way. The description itself says the book would tell us the “Seven Steps to Happiness.” I didn’t find it (at least not written that way) in the chapters I read, and did a search which produced nothing, so I’m not sure where they are but I couldn’t find them. I could not finish this book. It just got so long and monotonous for the above reasons. I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and the publisher to read and give my honest opinion.