If this Buddhist analysis is correct, then our entire conventional understanding of the history of happiness, which often tracks external conditions or subjective reports of feeling states, might be fundamentally misguided from the perspective of ultimate liberation. Maybe it isn't so important whether people's external expectations are fulfilled or whether they report enjoying pleasant feelings. From the Buddhist perspective, the main question concerning *ultimate* well-being (*Nirvana*) is whether people understand the truth about themselves – the truth of *anicca*, *dukkha*, and *anatta/sunyata* as applied to their own experience, leading to the cessation of craving and clinging. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better, or are more liberated from the pursuit of fleeting feelings and the illusion of self, than ancient foragers or medieval peasants? While access to information and perhaps certain forms of psychological understanding have increased, the fundamental conditioning of the mind towards craving (*tanha*), aversion (*dosa*), and delusion (*moha*), and the deeply ingrained habit of identifying with the aggregates as a self (*atta-vada*) remain powerful forces. Scholars have only recently begun to study the history of happiness as a distinct field, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for methodologies that might adequately capture the complexities of subjective experience across historical periods, let alone assess something as radical as the realization of non-self or the cessation of craving for conditioned phenomena. The Buddhist perspective suggests that a true history of *Nirvana* would look very different from a history of conventional happiness, focusing instead on the prevalence and efficacy of practices aimed at dismantling *avidya* and *tanha*, and the number of individuals who attained liberating insight.