For economists and stand-up comedians, human misery provides an endless source of material. Happiness, despite the hollow promises of countless advertisements and self-help gurus, is an elusive goal.

Who better to shed light on the subject than the so-called happiest man in the world? Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche is a humble Tibetan lama who laughs off such titles. But as Daniel Goleman wrote in The Times’s Happy Days blog, he is indeed “a master of the art of well-being.”

What is Mr. Rinpoche’s secret? The same thing that gets musicians to Carnegie Hall, Mr. Goleman wrote. Practice. Practice. Practice.

Growing up in a poor village in Nepal’s Himalayas, Mr. Rinpoche was prone to anxiety and panic attacks. But years of meditation have disciplined his mind to handle the trouble life sends his way. This was illustrated by brain scans of Mr. Rinpoche and other lamas that revealed unusually high and uninterrupted levels of activity in the left prefrontal lobe, the central neural zone for good feeling.

Bliss seekers who lack the focus for thousands of hours of meditation can simply go back to school. As Patricia Leigh Brown reported in The Times, the University of California at Berkeley offers a 10-month course called “Awakening Joy” that recommends singing, making lists of happy things and finding a “joy buddy.” There were no guarantees, however, that these techniques would hold up under the real-life pressures of a job dismissal, spousal rejection or a three-hour traffic jam.

But when happy lists fail, there is always the government, at least if you live in Bhutan. As Seth Mydans wrote recently in The Times, Bhutan’s Constitution ensures that all government programs must aim to support “gross national happiness.”

The government, Mr. Mydans wrote, “has determined that the four pillars of a happy society involve the economy, culture, the environment and good governance.” It is experimenting with mathematical formulas to distill these pillars into a measurable Gross National Happiness index. If they succeed, they would likely put the Misery Index espoused by some economists to shame.

Misery may have its place, though, even at a “Happiness and Its Causes” conference. The gathering, last year in San Francisco, explored such topics as “Compassion and the Pursuit of Happiness” and “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” while “happiness entrepreneurs” flitted about promoting “happiness makeovers” and meditation classes.

Ms. Brown wrote in The Times that the conference “knitted together many currents in the cultural ether: positive psychology, neuroplasticity, mindfulness-based stress reduction, the role of emotional support in cancer and the yogic ideal of ‘being in the present moment.’”

And yes, even the happiness conference drew a contrarian or two.

“Unhappiness about not being happy is a modern condition,” Darrin M. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University, told Ms. Brown. “We cannot feel good all the time, nor should we.”

Or as the American writer Edith Wharton once said: “If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.”