By Mary Pilon, Outside

Today, there are happiness consultants, happiness coaches, happiness summits, and happiness workplace seminars, which in some cases may be mandatory for employees. There are more than 70 TED Talks tagged with “happiness” or related themes, with tens of millions of views. Amazon’s pages contain more than 100,000 hits for happiness literature as the self-help shelves continue to brimmeth over. Some companies have even enlisted in-house happiness experts, most notably Google’s Jolly Good Fellow, hired for the purpose of making sure employees report that they’re not just doing their jobs, but are doing them with delight.

Globally, wellness is a $3.7 trillion industry, according to trade group Global Wellness Institute, which estimates that the staggering sum includes everything from beauty and anti-aging ($999 billion) to wellness tourism ($563 billion) to nutrition ($648 billion). Yet despite the trillions of dollars, the branding, and the brassy platitudes, Americans remain among the most miserable people on earth.

Happiness in this country—if you were to even try to measure it—has plunged. In 2007, the United Nations ranked the United States as the third happiest nation in the world, but in 2017, it dropped us to 19th place.

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