There is also, as the author mentions, a correlation between religiosity and happiness. Still, "start going to church" is not on the list of things to do. I'll hazard a guess that the author is not religious and thus doesn't consider it relevant. While I don't personally believe this a worthy pursuit, it does show the arbitrariness of the selection.

EDIT: Point 8 does touch on religion but does not (directly) endorse it.

This is on Less Wrong, a website devoted to rationality. You'll notice several times in the article he is clearly addressing a rationality-focused audience. For instance:

Without a magical deity to give you purpose, though, you'll have to find out for yourself what drives you.

He's writing for atheists. Telling an atheist "in order to be happy you need to get religion" is like telling a recovering alcoholic "in order to fall asleep you need to have a few drinks."

Instead of a recovering alcoholic, perhaps a teetotaler or other person sober on principle would be a better comparison. I've never believed gods could exist or had religion, and thoughts otherwise wouldn't tempt me.

You may be right. I chose alcoholic because suggesting they try drinking to solve one problem will cause other problems for them. If I were to try attending church in order to make myself happy, I would find myself 1) tortured by the inanity of everything that goes on there and 2) pained by the experience of behaving outwardly in a way that conflicts with my values.

However, there are also plenty of people who were raised religious who are now atheists. I've met many of them who have the same toxic relationship with religion that an alcoholic has with alcohol.

I share your views of religion. I also feel pretty much the same way if compelled to fake extroversion and attend, say, a fancy dinner reception. In the eyes of the article author, it is fine to dismiss religion while extroversion is to be coveted. I assume this to be because he is himself an extrovert atheist and can't imagine other people being happy in another way.

That's one of the entire problems with atheism: without a higher power to give your life purpose, it can be very difficult to suffer through yet another day on this earth full of such suffering and sorrow.

Nihilism has a similar issue.

It's icky.

And it is better to worship a deity that at the very least created "this earth full of such suffering and sorrow" if it isn't actively controlling it depending on your view of the deity's role in the world?

As for purpose it isn't that hard to have one; it can be as simple as to having a little happiness and trying to make the world around you just a tiny bit better rather than worse.

There is also no reason why for most people days should be things in general to "suffer through".

That's one of the problems with religiosity: you can't imagine a way to find meaning in the world without fooling yourself.

Or like telling a diabetic he needs an insulin pump.

Within a given country religious believers seem to be happier (based on many surveys) but I don't think you can suddenly choose to believe when you don't. On the other hand basically secular countries seem to have higher average happiness levels than fundamentalist ones.

Just a minor correction: introversion and shyness are not the same thing. You can be extroverted and shy, or introverted and gregarious[0].

The rest of your comment is still basically correct if you substitute the word introverted for shy, but this is a very common misconception about introversion I wanted to point out.

[0] Susan Cain did an op-ed in the WSJ or NYT explaining this distinction in more detail a while back. I'm on my phone but it should be easy to find online if you're interested.

I think that there could exist an introverted happy person who only seeks out happy things on the Internet. That wasn't possible before now.

I think the point npsimons was trying to make is there is selection bias in that statement, so it really says nothing about how many happy introverts there are.

I'm an introvert, for example, and generally very happy (but that's anecdotal evidence, which is also not helpful).

The assumption is that the researchers accounted for any sort of selection bias in who participates in the study. But that's an interesting point; maybe that assumption needs to be questioned further.

Maybe extrovert people just don't want to admit they're unhappy, because there's such a high social pressure to be happy all the time - people don't want to spend time with unhappy people, so everyone pretends they're happy. Introverts on the other hand just don't care :)

I tend to agree with you. I find that certain people I know who are extroverts always seem happy, but you spend enough time with them and get to know them, it's more or less a facade and they're not any more or less happy than others. Just like anything else I don't believe this to be universal, but it may be more common than advertised.