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.