The Happiness Project: I'm forcing myself to stop "saving" my clothes.

The Happiness Project

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT is the memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier – happily, it was a #1 New York Times bestseller. As one of the hundreds of experiments I've conducted, I started this blog. Here, I recount my daily adventures in pursuit of happiness. –

Gretchen Rubin

What Started Me Thinking

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." Mark Twain
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

This morning I had to force myself to put on the soft, stretchy pink hooded sweatshirt my mother gave me for Christmas. It wasn't that I don't like it; I like it TOO MUCH. I find myself "saving" it.

Because of this habit, I find that I have two piles in my closet: one of ratty, worn-out clothes I wear too much; and one of things I love, but refuse to wear, because I want to keep them nice.

Clearly this is ridiculous. Last weekend I threw away most (I confess, not all, just couldn't manage it) of the ratty pile and reminded myself of the things I should be wearing.

Here's an example. With pants and boots, I've been wearing a pair of black socks with holes in the heels and sprung elastic. In the same drawer, I have a new pair of black socks, still in the packaging, from Christmas two years ago. I kept wearing the horrible pair "one last time." It's no less wasteful to keep wearing the worn pair; I'm wasting the perfectly good socks by not wearing them! No more. This is one of my twelve commandments: SPEND OUT.

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