Download or read book Satisfaction Not Guaranteed written by Peter N. Stearns and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: being cheerful and modern -- The gap: happiness scales and the edge of sadness -- Component parts: modernity and ideas of happiness and progress as historical forces -- Modernity's deficiencies -- False starts and surprises: making modernity more difficult -- The dilemmas of work in modernity -- Death as a modern quandary -- Century of the child? Childhood, parenting, and modernity -- Born to shop: consumerism as the modern panacea.