Why do we so rarely feel happy, when there is no shortage of wise recipes for happiness? The philosopher Michael Hampe invites us to a thought experiment in this masterful piece of narrative philosophy. In four essays inspired by different traditions, he develops suggestions on how the goal of a perfect life could be achieved: either through reason or through spirituality, through skeptical distance from the world or through harmony between people and things. Complete happiness, Hampe suggests, can ultimately only lie in a life that has freed itself from doctrines and thus allows for contemplation of the world.