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Many happy countries have unusually high rates of suicide. … U.S. states … with people who are generally more satisfied with their lives tended to have higher suicide rates than those with lower average levels of life satisfaction. … Adjusting for clear population differences between the states including age, gender, race, education, income, marital status and employment status … still produced a very strong correlation. …
“Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life.” … “This result is consistent with other research that shows that people judge their well-being in comparison to others around them.” (more)
While it is good to be happy, be aware that your happiness comes a cost: it makes those around you feel worse by comparison. So please, only act happy if you actually are happy. It is hard to see how your gains from pretending to be happy could outweigh its harm on others. Yes, maybe pretending to be happy makes you a little bit more happy. But, really, it is ok and probably best to act unhappy if that is how you feel.
Unhappy Is OK
i'm surprised, this very precise concept was treated by Chesterton in one the Father Brown short stories. how personal hapiness can make other people miserable. The storie is called the "the three tools of death"
http://fiction.eserver.org/...
I don't think it's "I'm upset by your happiness" as much as "I'm depressed because my happiness is so low compared to how happy everyone around me seems to be". No one is suggesting that other people should be less happy; I think they're just noting that pretending to be happy (in order to fit in, etc) does impose a "cost" on others.
Whether this "cost" is sufficient to justify changing our behavior is a completely separate question - and one which pretty much has to be a subjective, personal, decision. After all, it's not like "pretending to be happier than you really are" could be a crime - or even a socially-disapproved-of state of mind.