“Happiness is contagious,” said Lau in a Nov. 1 lecture sponsored by the Neeje Association for Women and Fami ly here. “Happier children come from happy parents.”

Happiness is not a matter of genetics, he said, but something in the home.

Everyone’s searching for happiness, for themselves and for their children, yet happiness remains hard to find, he said.

Happiness is also difficult to measure, he said. It’s usually described as a subjective state. The problem of finding happiness goes back to the beginning of history. But happiness seems more elusive than ever, he said.

Depression is a “leading cause of disability,” with 10 times more people suffering from major depression than did in 1945, he said.

“We don’t know what we’re looking for and we don’t know what will make us happy,” he said. “We don’t know what happiness is.”

People often confuse happiness with pleasure, but if you aim for pleasure your aim is frustrated. Sometimes wanting something is better than having, he said.

“Perhaps the best thing to do is plan vacations and never go on them,” he quipped.

“We have a sense that for happiness to be real, to be lasting, it has to be earned,” he said. “There is more to life than sensual pleasure.”

But modern man tends to “reach for quick fixes,” he said.

Lau looked to the ancient philosophers for clues about happiness. The ancients realized “happiness is a matter of the soul” and is both objective and subjective, based on character and virtue, he said.