Most people aren't unhappy.

They're exhausted from trying to feel right.

In a culture that treats happiness as something to pursue, maintain, and optimize, emotional life has quietly turned into work. Effort is applied where effort cannot function. Motivation is added where settlement is required. Relief and pleasure are mistaken for happiness-and the chase never ends.

Stop Trying to Be Happy offers a calm, uncompromising reframe of modern emotional life. It does not provide techniques, habits, exercises, or advice. It does not promise improvement, positivity, or lasting emotional highs. Instead, it examines why the pursuit of happiness itself creates pressure-and what quietly changes when that pursuit stops interfering.

Through clear observation and everyday recognition, the book shows why happiness cannot be produced on demand, why emotional states collapse when treated as outcomes, and why calm often feels ordinary rather than exciting. It introduces a central reframe: happiness is not a reward to be earned, but a residue that appears when life is no longer being forced.

This is not a guide to becoming happier.

It is an invitation to stop working so hard at feeling right.

Written in a reflective, non-instructional voice, Stop Trying to Be Happy is for readers who feel emotionally tired without being depressed, functional yet strained, successful yet unsettled-and who sense that the problem is not their life, but the pressure placed on how it should feel.

Nothing needs to be achieved.

Happiness is not withheld.

It appears when chasing ends.