Calculated Bliss

Welcome to Optoria, where happiness is counted, audited, and optimised. Every smile, every sigh, every unit of "utility" feeds the nation's Gross Domestic Utility. John, a civil servant at the Ministry of Numbers, spends his days quantifying the nation's well-being-until the numbers begin to lose meaning. As reports contradict each other and citizens struggle to live up to the data, John starts to see cracks in the world he once believed in. Calculated Bliss is a quiet, unsettling novel about engineered happiness and the lives that slip through the gaps. With the bureaucratic unease of Kafka and the quiet moral tension of Ishiguro, it follows one ordinary man through corridors that never end toward a decision that might finally place meaning above the data.