The Happiness Project: The duty of 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.”

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” --Robert Louis Stevenson.

It sounds odd, perhaps, but we have a duty to be happy. Striving for happiness may appear to be a selfish goal, but it’s not. Think about it.

Studies show that happy people are generally more sociable, creative, forgiving, and tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, brooding, and antagonistic. Happy people tend to be more responsible to others and to maintain relationships better. They’re more confident, optimistic, energetic, and likeable, and they tend to be more successful in their personal lives and at work. They do more volunteer work and give more to charity. They’re healthier. They commit fewer crimes. When people are in a good mood, they think more clearly and are more open to new ideas. Although depressed people are more vigilant against making mistakes, people think more flexibly and with more complexity when they’re in good moods.

And happy people lift other people’s moods (that’s “emotional contagion”). That’s why it’s so much fun to be around cheery babies. To hear the Little Girl shriek with laughter while playing “peekaboo” or to see her eyes widen with ecstasy when she eats ice cream…it’s such a cliché, but zoikes, it makes me happy.

In the same way, if I’m happy (or at least act happy), I help make other people happy.

This realization has led me to make a bigger show of my happiness—sometimes, even beyond what I really feel. For example, when my book, Forty Ways to Look at JFK, came out last fall, various people asked questions which were meant to elicit a response from me like, “I’m so thrilled it’s out! It’s so exciting to see it on the shelves! Everything is going great! I’m so happy!”

Now, as happy as I was that the book was in bookstores, and as much as I love the book (I always love my own books), I have a perfectionist, dissatisfied, worrying nature. I rarely feel a pure happy feeling. But I realized that I should highlight my happy feelings, and shut up about my fretful feelings. Let people take happiness from my happiness.

And of course, as research shows, acting happier will actually make me feel happier.

Saying that we have a “duty to be happy” makes being happy sound like hard work. It is.

Comments

An insightful post, Gretchin. Rats! I have to work at my life? Oh Grrr! I've made mention of your thoughts here, on my blog. Commonsense and the obvious are so easily overlooked! Cheer, Alison.

Posted by: Alison Tuck | June 14, 2006 at 08:08 AM

wow! I so agree. It's a paradigm shift to look upon it as a duty. I've known that there is an effort involved, just as there is in having fun, or being social, or maintaining a relationship. But just the simple thing of being happy...

very nice!

cheers! :)

Posted by: Mithun bhat | June 16, 2006 at 09:00 AM

I love, love, LOVE this essay, even though I'm reading it two years after you wrote it.

Posted by: Karen Kay | June 04, 2008 at 02:30 PM

Hi Gretchen,
Thanks for being happy for us, your readers.
Sometimes we just have to be happy, for others even if it's not for us.
And happiness is contagious, both towards ourselves and towards others.
Congratz for your book, btw!

Cheers,
Robert

Posted by: Robert A. Henru | June 12, 2008 at 01:39 AM

You are an inspiration!!!Keep the great work..

Posted by: Miguel Delgado | June 13, 2008 at 08:30 AM

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