The Happiness Experiment

I’ve just received and read The Happiness Experiment, a new book by my friend Carl B Barney. And a very interesting read it is. 

A bit of background. Carl is an entrepreneur who was much influenced by the individualist author Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, among much else). She maintained that you should pursue your rational self-interest, and that means pursuing happiness, everyone’s ultimate goal. Not the fleeting happiness of eating an ice cream and such, but your long-term happiness in your career, relationships, and creative work.

Carl describes how a near-death experience caused him to think more deeply about happiness in life. It’s something that’s not as elusive as people think, he says. Rather, it is something that needs to be cultivated through conscious effort. That requires self-awareness, the application of reason, and proactive decision-making.

After his near-death experience, he realised more urgently the importance of living with purpose and intention. And the importance of instilling that urgency in the minds of the friends he cared for. So, he hit on something novel. Instead of leaving financial bequests to friends after death, why not leave them pre-quests while still alive? And those pre-quests could be more than just money—they could also be opportunities, helping start a business, mending family relationships, encouragement, or many other kinds of practical and emotional support. So, he distributed ‘Happiness Grants’ to twenty friends, each of whom he thought could use them usefully. Indeed, he made a point of talking it through with each friend, encouraging them to think more deeply about what support might help them best and how they would use that support to promote their own long-term rational self-interest and happiness.

That, he says, is a win-win. The benefit to the recipient is obvious. To the giver, there is the joy of knowing that their thoughtful, targeted help has changed people’s lives. So, everyone ends up happier. And the recipients really think through how they can best use that support and strive to show how it has—something you do not see with after-death bequests that come unexpectedly, and not necessarily at the best time.

In a purposeful yet conversational, jargon-free style, Carl tells the story of his personal journey and tells the story of his twenty pre-quest recipients and how they fared. Each is a little case-study about the nature of happiness and how to achieve it, clearly told. They are very diverse stories about very diverse people, each with a different take on what happiness means to them. But the author weaves them into a unified threat against the background of his philosophical outlook, following Rand’s ideas on value, virtue and egoism—that is, pursuing your own happiness without harming others. And they show how single acts of generosity—often quite small ones—can ripple out and cause other great things.

The book is noteworthy for its optimism about generosity and happiness, and it is a practical lesson in how to do the first and maximise the second. It challenges readers to re-think how they spend their time, money and experience in ways that demonstrably benefit not only themselves but all the friends and family whom they love and admire. 

Carl B Barney, (2025) ‘The Happiness Experiment’. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press.

Eamonn Butler