Lay conceptions of well-being are people’s beliefs about the nature of well-being. Researchers have recently identified and studied some of these beliefs, including: eudaimonism (the notion that well-being consists of certain skills and virtues rather than merely happy and pleasurable experiences), fear of happiness (the notion that experiencing happiness may cause bad things to happen), fragility of happiness (the notion that happiness is transient and can be easily and quickly replaced by neutral or unhappy states), externality of happiness (the notion that we have limited control over our happiness, and our happiness is mainly determined by external factors such as fate), and transformative suffering (the notion that unhappiness and suffering can contribute to well-being). This presentation reviews recent cross-sectional and longitudinal studies on lay conceptions of well-being across cultures.