A Very Happy Birthday, Guaranteed by Nigel Roth

Let me take you back just a few years to 2014.

It wasn’t a particularly happy year, unless you became a proud new citizen of the Donetsk People’s Republic maybe, one of the most recent nations to emerge (half-recognised) from the fallout of the end of the Soviet union.

While the Donetskians were discussing passport colors, and whether they had enough steroids for an Olympic challenge, Victor Argonov a few miles up the road, was ensuring a very happy future for all of us, using the principle of hedodynamics.

Hedodynamics, if you’re not familiar, is a scientific discipline that uses neuroscience to discover ‘postulates of pleasure’, or neural changes, that correlate to that euphoric feeling, the one you probably had before you started reading this piece.

The essence of Argonov’s work is to enable future humans to use hedodynamics to program themselves to do the things that make them happy, and avoid, if possible, the things that have the opposite effect.

We can then add postulates as needed to get us to Nirvana.

Of course, this still doesn't actually answer the question of exactly how happy we are. The problem has always been how to measure that, and it has occupied the minds of ph