The Happiness Project: I remind myself to apply some key rules about being happy.

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.”

A review in the New York Times Book Review this weekend mentioned a “newly popular genre” that author Hugo Lindgren called “stunt nonfiction”--when the writer reads the whole encyclopedia or says yes to every date for a year.

Reading this threw me into a panic. Oh no, I’m part of a genre--and a “stunt genre" at that! It took me such a long time to decide how to write the Happiness Project, and now I discover that I’m part of a movement. How depressing.

And on top of that, I can’t even count the number of books on happiness that have hit the bookstores in the last year.

I felt defensive and anxious; I started imagining how imaginary future reviewers would attack the Happiness Project.

Then I remembered—this is not the way to happiness! I know better. Laugh out loud, make fun of myself, act the way I want to feel, re-frame.

So I said to myself, “How funny, I’m part of a movement without knowing it. I missed the dot-com boom, I don’t have an iPod, I don’t watch American Idol, but for once I’m tapped right into the zeitgeist. People are interested in happiness, they're interested in other people's experiences.”

I immediately felt a surge of relief.

Comments

I think your Twelve Commandments are thought-provoking, worthwhile, and adaptable to any age or lifestyle. I not only missed the dot.com boom, don't have an iPod, and don't watch American Idol, but I only have a cell phone when I can find it - which means it is never charged. To these deficiencies(?), I can add, not having a clue what a TypeKey or TypePad account is. If I have one, I am not sure where I keep it. Your yet-to-be-published Commandments helped me: climb a mountain in Ireland when I turned 70; take a hot-air balloon ride over Berlin at age 71; started writing my second book at age 72; survive finding my obit in the paper at 73; come off all of my heart meds and take my first Harley ride on my 74th. Happiness is not just for the young! Neither is writing. Even though a self-appointed "authority" advised to find a new hobby, I forged ahead and published my first book at age 69, my second at age 74, and am working on my third. We should be considerate, but we do not have to live our life to please other people - least of all, book reviewers. We should glean what is worthwhile and discard what doesn't apply. Keep doing you are doing and be happy about it. You Go, Girl! P. S. If I last another few weeks to greet age 75, I plan to have a shamrock tattooed on me bum.

Posted by: Ann Milholland Webb | June 10, 2006 at 10:58 AM

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