Believe it or not, the International Day of Happiness exists.

It is a true holiday falling on March 20, created by the United Nations, in which every person in the world should take a day to ... Dunno, I do not know exactly.
If you think something cynical, you're right.
The pressure to be happy, in 2017, can be overwhelming at best, and at worst generate illusions impossible to be realized.
There is a raving lunatic to the US government, hate crimes are on the agenda of the Apocalypse and the clock is 30 seconds closer to midnight.
But that has not prevented many scientists, philosophers, psychologists and spiritual leaders, all well-wishers, trying to penetrate the mechanism of happiness.
Thanks to real studies, conducted by real institutions and published by academic journals really, now we know that happiness can be achieved more smiling.
O with eight hugs a day -yes, exactly eight hugs a day.
And then there is the eminence grise of all searches on happiness, the Grant Study, which for nearly a century following hundreds of men and around Harvard, analyzes the behavior and tries to determine what are the elements of a full life , happy.
George Vaillant, a Harvard psychiatrist who led the study for three decades (1972-2004), had been synthesized so the conclusions: "The Grant Study leads to a clear conclusion: happiness is love.
Many researchers of the World Summit Happiness their agreement: the research on the subject has made great strides.
"Not much has changed since 2007, at least, nothing fundamental," says Tal Ben-Shahar, the conference speaker and former Harvard professor, whose positive psychology classes have reached the historic summit of popularity in the history of the university .
"The most important steps forward are being made in the area of neuroscience.
We are learning more and more things on the brain, and how it appears in various emotional states. "
The brain scans have led to some very important-for example discovered that the subjective happiness arises especially in the right precuneus brain-but this is why you are happy, not how to be happy.
One of the people who have undergone scanning is Matthieu Ricard, a Tibetan Buddhist monaco and speaker of the conference.
It was dubbed "the happiest man in the world" -headline claiming to hate, but which nevertheless has been confirmed by science, when neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin have monitored their brain waves with an EEG [electroencephalogram] and found that his mind is capable of "an abnormal amount of happiness."
But Ricard does not intend to be an exceptional case.
Rather, he thinks everyone can achieve a permanent state of well-being once they got rid of "emotional afflictions such as hatred, obsession, arrogance, jealousy and confusion.
That state of being is a bit 'the wisdom that allows us to see the world for what it is, without veils or distortions. "
To see her so, it seems the wisdom of a man who does not use social media, which has never had a job to achieve what he had to do an hour's subway, which has never been to a family meal when your right relatives want to share their opinions with you, who never had a fight with his girlfriend for who should do the dishes.
"Unfortunately, our control of the outside world is limited, temporary and often illusory," says Ricard.
"Our mind can be our friend or our worst enemy.
Train her, which is the deeper meaning of meditation, it is crucial to deal effectively with the illusions and negative emotions that are the causes of suffering.
But the reason why many of us (me for example) have prostranti reactions, it is that this way of thinking does not take into account the sadness.
Think that our discomfort are just "illusions and negative emotions."
We should therefore escape the sadness?
Maybe it is happiness that is not a big deal.
Eric Wilson, a professor at Wake Forest University and author of Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, says that the way diagnose depression is changed.
"What once would have been considered a bit 'of sadness, for example in case of death of a loved one, now, if he lasts a little' more than normal, was immediately called clinical depression," he says.
"We get very little, to produce a diagnosis of depression."
Wilson, who suffers from bipolar disorder, says he personally fight against the expectations of our culture that you're always happy.
"I thought I had something wrong because I was not always happy," he says.
"In our culture there is a stigma on the sadness."
Many scholars in this field consider happiness and sadness like an ultimatum.
Are you happy or are sad, and everything depends on a choice you made.
"We have to water the seeds of happiness, and not everyone is ready to do it," says Chetri, the World Happiness Summit speaker.
"We need a new definition of happiness.
I think we would be happier if we could eliminate the sadness.
How to do this is the question we want to answer. "
In theory, eliminate the sadness in toto it seems a fantastic idea.
Remember inside out?
He said important things about sadness.
Not because the aid sadness to appreciate happiness, or we can bring happiness, but why sadness, in itself, is an emotion that is worth a try.
If you're not sad at times, perhaps many times, you are missing something in life.
I'm a father, I saw Inside Out with my son, and I cried like a baby.
Not because I realized that I had to accept the sadness as part of life, but because I knew I had to do it my son.
The message pro-sadness Inside Out is for children, not for us.
Our job is to be happy and satisfied all the time.
"We will learn, eventually, to think in a less black / white and more useful," says Randy J. Paterson, clinical psychologist and author of How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use.
We will discover that 'emotions are normal, they are not deadly disease to eradicate.
And even if the science of happiness come to the point of accepting that sometimes people choose to be sad, because in some cases, sadness may be the most genuine emotion?
The sadness, in some cases, can be very satisfying.
As Victor Hugo once wrote, "The Melancholy is the joy of being sad."
Last year I reached the summit of happiness when my baseball team won the world championship, and I cried because I missed my father, who died about 15 years ago.
Not in the sense that my tears came to my eyes.
In the sense that I cried like a calf.
All that I had held in for more than a decade, because I was too focused on being happy and positive-are an adult, for heaven's sake, and adults do not drown in their malaise-rose to the surface.
The night that my team, the town where I live team won, I went out on the street and I met dozens of men in tears.
We exchanged five senior in tears.
I simply made agreeing to be very, very, very sad and angry and hurt by the fact that my father had not lived long enough to celebrate the victory of his team.
It was a relief to finally have an excuse to say, "I hate everything, fuck."
Let ghermisse the pain I caused me an adrenaline rush.
I felt alive, no thoughts, grateful.
Maybe it's the same feeling of happiness experienced by experts when they do yoga on the beach and think positive thoughts.
Many researchers and experts with whom I spoke on the issue of nicchiato sadness, or insisted that being unhappy is not necessary, so that everyone can overcome negative emotions meditating and thinking positive.
Everything would be reduced to "find their way from sadness leads to happiness," he explained Chetri.
Some-like Neil Pasricha, director of the Institute for Global Happiness, and bestselling author of The Happiness Equation -have confirmed instead that it is a problem to be discussed, not only in research but also among ordinary people trying to orient themselves in the fields undermined the emotional life.
"A question I get very often to me, 'How can I be happy forever?"
You can not, and should not even try.
It is not a matter of seeing the world all positive or all negative.
What you have to begin to understand, it is that the glass is neither half full nor half empty.
"Attach the positive psychology-the science of happiness and well-being of man-because it does not consider the sadness is a dummy argument," he says.
"Very few researchers would tell you that we have to forget the sadness.
That is one thing to self-help or New Age guru.
Pretend that sadness does not exist does nothing inasprirla.
It is important to give ourselves permission to be human. "
But anyway, the Happiness Summit does not seem to leave much room to explore the sadness.
If you really sadness is given equal importance, because it does not include at least one or two panels with titles like "Only God knows how much I'm hurting right now (and that's OK)" or "I'm dying, you're dying, we all die?"
I sent my ideas to the co-founder of the summit, the Guggenheim, and she has appreciated.
"The sadness should be more central in the discussion.
And then, seamlessly, he begins to talk about her husband, who died four years ago.
"We have been married 21 years, and I have lost influence," he says.
Who dies of influenza in the United States? "
I felt, from his voice, how broken his heart.
It was the same anger that I had withheld I heard my mother when my father died.
It was peaceful setting of "Fuck you, universe, how fucking dare you do this to me?"
"My husband was a wonderful man, brilliant, kind," he says.
"How do you go from that black hole where nothing seems to make sense, everything hurts and it's horrible, the creation of a Happiness Summit?"
"It's like going from 'I lost the love of my life because of a drunk driver' to 'Oktoberfest organizer I'."
"It's terrible, shit," I agree.
I hear it on Thanksgiving, Christmas, the anniversary of our marriage, on her birthday.
When I try to imagine how it would be to see my wife die on me before my eyes ... I just think torments.
"But the point is," he continues, "is a feeling that comes and goes like a wave.
You can not stay there forever stuck.
It could be because he continued to tell me it's not an expert, who has a doctorate, who is not trained to meditate together with the Dalai Lama.
Perhaps it is because there is still insisting that happiness awaits us with open arms, if only we decide to make an effort.
Happiness exists, of course, but the sadness will not go away.
"You're making me miss my father," I say.
"Suffering is a great catalyst for change."

From Vice