The Happiness Project: Happiness, Profane Waste, and pre-goal attainment positive affect.

The Happiness Project

I’m working on a book, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, a memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about how to be happy--from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah. On this daily blog, I recount my adventures as I grapple with the challenge of being happier. THE HAPPINESS PROJECT will hit the shelves in December 2009 (Harper).

What Started Me Thinking

"Whoever is happy will make others happy, too." 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.”

Today is a big day for the Happiness Project: I just got back from the book party for Profane Waste, a book I did in collaboration with artist Dana Hoey.

While we were in college (Dana at Wesleyan and I at Yale), Dana came to New Haven for a semester to live with Megan, who was one of her best friends, and me. So we became friends. Afterward, Dana and I lost touch, but we reconnected years later in New York City.

In the intervening time, Dana had become a well-established artist, a photographer.

I’d gone to law school, and while there, I happened to see a friend (okay, it was the Big Man, while we were dating) throw a newly purchased, never-opened package of cheesecake into the garbage—an action that doesn’t sound particularly significant, yet it shocked me profoundly.

I was so struck by this episode that I decided to try to write a law paper to figure out why—contrary to conventional economic expectations—owners might choose to waste their own property, and why such actions are so disturbing and thrilling.

My curiosity deepened when, after I asked a prominent property professor to supervise a paper on the topic, I was told not to bother because “People don’t deliberately waste their own possessions.” Oh yes, they do. I gave this phenomenon a name, profane waste, to explain actions like:

o For decades, a concentration camp survivor carried a sandwich in his pocket each day, and nothing gave him greater pleasure than to toss away the sandwich each night.
o Movie producer Don Simpson’s determination to wear each of his identical pairs of Levi’s only once required more effort than rotating the same few pairs of jeans.
o In the movie Titanic, Rose neither wears nor sells the diamond necklace she’s kept for decades, but casts it into the ocean in tribute to her long-dead lover.

I did write a law paper on this topic, and even wrote a long, bad novel about it, but neither satisfied me. I kept collecting examples of profane waste wherever I saw them.

Then Dana and I crossed paths again. Energized by visiting her studio, I hoped we could collaborate on a project. Then, over coffee one morning, after Dana had read my essay on profane waste, we decided to grapple with this subject together.

And so I wrote an essay, and Dana took a series of photographs. But we made the classic creative mistake: producing something we loved without a clear vision of what exactly to do with it. And so the profane waste project stayed on the shelf for some time.

Then—and here’s the crazy Oprah-like touch—I was talking to a friend from law school, a guy who is hugely knowledgeable about contemporary art. I knew he collected Dana’s work, and I mentioned that we’d done this project together. Well, it turned out he was starting an art publishing company, and he was interested in considering publishing our project.

We presented what we had done, he was interested, I re-wrote and expanded the essay, Dana took many more photographs, we went through editing, book design…and tonight was the book party.

The Big Man threw that piece of cheesecake into the garbage in June 1992. Now it’s almost June 2006, and my long obsession has reached a gorgeous culmination.

I was thrilled tonight at the Profane Waste book party, of course. But not as thrilled as I might have expected. My happiness came along the way, while I was making progress toward the goal, not at the moment I reached it.

Hitting on the name “profane waste”…grasping its three variations (heedless waste, defying waste, defiant waste)…hearing that an Economics NOBEL LAUREATE was going to write a book blurb…meeting Dana for coffee to talk about the project…learning about book jacket design…these were the stages where I felt happiest.

Researcher Richard Davidson infelicitously calls this “pre-goal attainment positive affect"--the happiness that comes from progressing toward a goal. It’s much greater than the moment of hitting the mark.

Shakespeare was right: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

(The full text of Profane Waste, though alas, without Dana Hoey’s photographs, can be found here.)

Comments

Congratulations Gretchen, and what an intriguing and original subject! I have to admit, when I read that Lisa Marie Presley had thrown her $40,000 engagement ring from Nicholas Cage into the ocean during a big argument, I became obsessed with telling everyone I knew about it: all my friends, the person at the check out counter at the grocery store and anyone waiting in line next to me anywhere. So I would have to agree, profane waste is fascinating.

Posted by: Bebek | May 30, 2006 at 09:52 PM

What a fantastic example of profane waste -- I wish I'd heard that story in time to incorporate it into the book. So often people protest to me, "No one destroys their own property -- that would be crazy!" But some people do: a $40,000 ring, a $400 bottle of wine, a $4 pen.

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Posted by: ghjdlmgel | August 19, 2007 at 08:07 AM

I find the term "profane waste" terribly ironic, because the term I immediately thought of when you described the phenomenon was "sacrifice".

Posted by: Brynn | April 14, 2008 at 03:40 PM

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