The Happiness Project

This Saturday: a quote from Anne Lamott.

“But about a month before my friend Pammy died, she said something that may have permanently changed me. We had gone shopping for a dress for me to wear that night to a nightclub with the man I was seeing at the time. Pammy was in a wheelchair, wearing her Queen Mum wig, the Easy Rider look in her eyes. I tried on a lavender minidress, which is not my usual style. I tend to wear big, baggy clothes. People used to tell me I dressed like John Goodman. Anyway, the dress fit perfectly, and I came out to model it for her. I stood there feeling very shy and self-conscious and pleased. Then I said, ‘Do you think it makes my hips look too big?’ and she said to me slowly, 'Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.’”
--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Do you hoard your new underwear?

The most idiosyncratic and cryptic of “My Twelve Commandments” (see left column) is “Spend out.” What does that mean?

I have a miserly nature; by spending out, I mean to stop hoarding, to trust in abundance.

I find myself saving things, even when it makes no sense. Right now I’m forcing myself to spend out by wearing my new underwear.

Last week, as part of my July “buy a white t-shirt” campaign, I went to buy new underwear. When I got home, I forced myself to toss out my sorry old pairs, because I could feel myself tempted to “save” the new underwear. And indeed, even though the old underwear is gone, I find myself re-wearing the same laundered new pairs, so that I can “save” the new ones that are still neatly folded, with their tags on.

Why buy new clothes and then “save” them for months? Not wearing clothes is just as wasteful as throwing them away.

I have a great set of bookmarker pens—flat pens that can be stuck in a book, so that you can take notes as well as mark your place. I love them so much that I leave them in the case. That’s crazy—spend out, use them!

I once went to a bridal shower where every guest was given a black umbrella with a handle made from an old piece of silver, with the guest’s initial on it (zoikes). I loved my umbrella so much that I didn’t open it for three years. Finally I started to use it, and about 18 months later, the umbrella broke. But it was far better to use the umbrella, and enjoy it, than to have it sit in the closet.

I need to spend out by throwing things away. I re-use razor blades too many times, I keep my toothbrushes for too long. There is a virtue and a joy to frugality, and there is a preppy wabi-sabi to soft, faded khakis and frayed cotton shirts, but it’s not nice to be surrounded by things that are truly worn out or stained or used up.

And spend out applies to creativity as well as to possessions. I find myself thinking, “I should save that story…” or “I don’t want to use all my best examples now…” But pouring out ideas is better for creativity than doling them out by the teaspoon.

My post on Wednesday was a perfect example. I had a lot of fun working on the organization quiz. But when I considered posting it, I had to fight the urge to hold it back. What am I waiting for? I'm reminded of tagline for the Broadway show Rent—which gave me a shock every time it blasted out at me from the ubiquitous taxi ads—No day but today.

*

I’m leaving tomorrow for vacation, so this will be my last post for a week. Last night, in a happiness-project inspired act, I went ahead and packed for me, the Little Girl, and the Big Girl, so I have today to worry about hunting down the odds and ends.

Because I’ve been reading so much non-fiction about happiness, I haven’t been reading many novels lately. So for vacation I’m taking Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (I loved Gilead); Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby (ever since I wrote Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, I’ve been meaning to read Disraeli); Mrs. Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (about time I read something by her); Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (I’m not a big Roth fan, but several people have told me they think it’s the best novel of the 20th century); and as a special treat, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games (not yet published, supposed to be superb, I got a copy of the galley).

Looking at this list, I realize—am I crazy? We're only going away for a week, and chasing around after a seventeen-month-old is hardly compatible with doing a lot of serious reading. Oh well, I’ll try. But I think the Big Man will have to carry that duffel bag.

The happiness of making progress toward a goal.

My resolution for June was to “Eat a peach”—embrace adventure, push myself to my limits, aim higher, indulge my interests.

And a focus for “Eat a peach” is this blog. I’m technologically very backward, and when I try to monkey around in the internet world, I’m often overwhelmed with the nasty feelings of stupidity and helplessness. Nevertheless, I vowed to persist in improving my site. Recently I’ve had three successes.

The first success was managing to change my URL to www.happiness-project.com from www.happinessproject.typepad.com. That original URL was just too long, and I didn’t like having the word “typepad” there. It took me five separate “help-tickets” from Typepad support to coach me through the process, but I stuck with it.

Second, a reader emailed me to suggest that in the Wednesday Tips section of the left column, instead of listing the dates and subjects of the lists, I should make the list into links. That way readers could instantly zap their way to a particular list, instead of having to hunt it down through the archive.

I read his email with a sigh. Of course, he was right. But how to do it? It only required one day and one help-ticket to get that done.

And today, after two help-tickets, I’m inserting my first image. Like so many of these tasks, it wasn’t hard—once I knew what to do.
Anyone who knows anything is chuckling in amusement at the fact that I’m congratulating myself for such very simple tasks—but for me, they count as successes. Each time I look at the blog, I get a little jolt of satisfaction.

Making tangible progress toward a concrete goal is a great contributor to happiness, so it’s important to incorporate that into your day, whether as part of work (as in my blog upgrades), or as part of a hobby (gardening, collecting, crafts).

Your goal needs to be clearly defined, to give you the satisfaction of recognizing your progress. In fact, studies show that those who frame their goals in concrete terms are 50% more likely to feel confident that they’ll hit those goals, and 32% more likely to feel in control of their lives.

Seeing things take shape under your hand, making things better, is enormously gratifying. Even if you deem the final goal to be fairly insignificant—cleaning a closet, organizing fishing tackle, building a bird house—the boost to happiness can be quite significant.

My next goal? Figure out Technorati.

weblog; goals, plans, hopes; happiness

This Wednesday: a quiz--are you organized or disorganized?

Usually Wednesday is Tip Day, but surprise, today is a quiz instead.

Most people understand that it's a pain to be disorganized. Disorganized people spend a lot of time hunting for their keys; they have to order a replacement birth certificate; they know they must have a dozen hammers, because it’s always been easier to buy a new one than to locate one in the house.

Often, however, people don’t realize how disorganized they are. Are you? Take this quiz.

At a minimum, you should know exactly where to find these possessions (assuming, of course, you own them—and you should):

 stamps
 your passport and if you’re married, your spouse’s passport
 a corkscrew
 Bandaids
 a safety pin
 a flashlight
 a functioning alarm clock
 paperclips or a stapler
 your phone charger
 a spare set of keys
 your doctor’s phone number
 cinnamon
 your tax statements from 2003
 fabric stain remover
 a pair of mittens
 spare AA batteries

Congratulate yourself for being well-organized if you can also say exactly where you’d find these objects:

 a tape measure
 your high-school yearbook
 a Swiss army knife
 a pencil sharpener
 a copy of Pride and Prejudice or The Da Vinci Code
 the instruction manual for your camera
 silver polish
 a vase the proper size to hold a bunch of tulips
 food coloring
 a tube of lip balm
 a cheese knife
 an extension cord
 a recipe for a favorite food your mother or father used to make
 a pack of playing cards
 a pad of sticky notes (Post-Its)

One observation: disorganized people often aim to put things away approximately. They’ll keep something “in a kitchen drawer” or “in my office.” It’s much more satisfying to put things away in an exact location—like a particular kitchen drawer. It takes some effort, at first, to decide where everything belongs, but once you’ve put objects in their proper places, it’s much easier to return them there.

organization, daily life, clutter

The happiness of keeping photo albums.

For years, I’ve been conscientiously maintaining our photo albums. I use them as a kind of family diary, to capture little family jokes or funny incidences as well as the usual round of birthday party, Christmas morning, and vacation scenes.

I performed this task with a fair amount of grumbling—no one cared, no one helped, no one appreciated what a big job it was, no one ever cooperated when I wanted to take pictures, the Big Man wouldn’t even help write captions, blah, blah.

As part of the Happiness Project, however, I’ve admonished myself to do such tasks (sending out our annual Valentine’s cards, buying baby gifts for friends, paying bills) without expecting appreciation. I should do them for myself. This sounds like a selfish approach, but in fact, it’s less selfish, because it means I don’t wait for praise or recognition.

Nevertheless, the whole elaborate photo album process had begun to seem a bit futile, as the fat albums sat neglected on the shelves.

But at last all that hard work is paying off. For the last several days, the Big Girl and even the Little Girl have been poring over the albums, going through each one several times (the Little Girl has been wreaking some damage, but nothing that can’t be fixed). The Big Girl loves to see pictures of herself as young as the Little Girl, and to see herself wearing the adorable outfits that the Little Girl is wearing now. The Little Girl shrieks with excitement each time she spots a familiar face.

Advice often given to a parent—and it’s just as useful for a spouse—is to be a storehouse for happy memories for the family.

Research has shown that depressed people have as many nice experiences as other people, but they don’t remember them as well. And even for people who aren’t depressed, thinking back on happy times elevates mood.

Observing and preserving memories is one of the most satisfying ways of bringing order to life. Both the process of preparing the albums (though I did complain) and looking back at them were deeply gratifying.

Looking back at photographs is always fun; it’s fascinating to see the appearances of children (and myself! the Big Man always looks the same) change over time.

Also, it scares me to realize just how little of my own past I remember.

Looking at the photographs helps keep my memories more active, as I recall the little details that seemed unforgettable, but fade so quickly: how the Big Man used to make rice pudding all the time, and how he used to swim for exercise; how tiny the Big Girl was when she was born (four pounds, four ounces) and how she used to love to see people pretend to cry; and how the Little Girl loves to show off her belly button, and how she looked before any of her teeth grew in.

How wistful I was when I no longer had my sweet toothless baby! It makes me happy that, at least, I still have the photos.

The challenge of predicting what will make you happy in the future.

I just finished Daniel Gilbert’s new book, Stumbling on Happiness. It’s thought-provoking, but in case you don’t have time to read it yourself, here’s my fourth-grade-book-report-style summary of “The parts I found most interesting.”

Gilbert’s main argument is that we aren’t very good at predicting what will make us happy in the future. This matters, because if we want to take steps in the present that will contribute to our future happiness, we need to be able to anticipate what, in fact, will make us happy—consider the person who splurges on a $300 professional tattoo today, only to pay a painful $6,000 in ten years to remove it. The job you have, the body you have, the city you live in—all reflect decisions you made in the past about what you’d care about in the future.

Gilbert suggests a remedy: To predict what’s likely to make you happy in the future, ask someone who is having that experience at the moment. So ask people who are associates at law firms whether they like their jobs; ask people who just visited Prague with their kids whether they had fun (the more similar such surrogates are to you, the more helpful their information is likely to be).

Gilbert maintains that although we all feel very idiosyncratic, we’re much more alike in our preferences than we imagine—so the experience of other people is the best guide to follow.

I recently applied this principle myself, without realizing it. When considering starting a blog, instead of reading among the dozens of Internet articles about the joys, trials, and lessons about running a blog, I asked three bloggers I knew whether they enjoyed doing it, and how they did it.

One friend is a prominent columnist for Vanity Fair who keeps his blog as an extension of his writing. James Wolcott. One is a novelist who keeps her blog for a lark, to indulge her love for food, restaurants, and cooking. Lunch for Two. One is a law professor who runs a blog to generate discussion on legal topics that interest him. Volokh Conspiracy.

These three gave me uncannily accurate and useful advice. Although at the time, I felt like a loser for doing nothing more than talking to people I randomly happened to know, this approach was probably far more helpful than doing proper “research.”

On a slightly different topic, I was intrigued to learn from Stumbling on Happiness that often, our behavior is designed to ward off the nasty feeling of regret (the feeling of self-blame for an unfortunate outcome that we might have prevented if we’d acted differently). Apparently people regret not taking an action more than they regret taking an action. Gilbert speculates that that’s because it’s easier to console ourselves with the lessons learned by some action gone awry than to see the good that came from the failure to act.

This is a very helpful observation about actions ; I think, however, that it’s absolutely not true of speech. I very often regret a remark that I made. In fact, I'm trying to train myself that if it even crosses my mind that I should refrain from saying something, I should think no further, but just shut up.

Idle criticism, sharp remarks, needling jokes, minor gossip…I don’t need to consult with anyone else to predict that, in the future, I won’t regret having kept silent.

This Saturday: a quote from Bertrand Russell.

“The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive amusements, such as shows and good things to eat, and they do not realize the importance to a child of having one day like another, except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions. The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts himself from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness…certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony. Take, say, Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude.’” --Bertrand Russell

A Secret of Adulthood: What you do EVERY DAY matters more than what you do ONCE IN A WHILE.

A friend who works at the Wall Street Journal mentioned a comment she’d heard from a financial advisor: if you want to make a big, indulgent purchase, you’re better off splurging on a one-time expense instead of a continuing expense. Buy a painting instead of joining a country-club. Buy some DVDs instead of signing up for HBO.

The next day, I happened to read Francis Bacon’s elegant articulation of that rule: “A man ought warily to begin charges which once begun will continue; but in matters that return not he may be more magnificent.”

This rule is a sub-set of a very important Secret of Adulthood: what you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.

Going for a long run once a week isn’t as beneficial as going for a shorter run four times a week. I never make my work-out unpleasantly challenging, because I know that if I dread it, I won’t go as often.

You’re better off splurging on occasional super-decadent dessert when you go out for a nice dinner, than stopping for a Krispy Kreme doughnut each day on the way to work.

A gourmet grocery store near my apartment keeps a tray of cookie samples in the bakery section. Whenever I shopped there, I took two or three (large) pieces. Then I started going into the store every time I passed by, just to get the samples. Finally I realized: I was probably eating the equivalent of two or three enormous cookies each week. Now I take a sample when I’m actually shopping (almost never, because the Big Man likes to shop there himself), and I never go in otherwise.

It’s discouraging, but true, that a spouse or a child will remember the one time you yelled better than the hundred times you held your temper. Or in my case, the one day when we were five minutes late for kindergarten drop-off, instead of every other day, when we were waiting ahead of time. Take heart, though; in the long run, it’s what we usually do that sets the tone for the household.

At work, it’s acceptable to lose your temper in an obnoxious way every once in a while. It happens. If you do it rarely, people will ignore your lapse except to feel embarrassed for you. But if you do it regularly, you’ll get a reputation as a jerk.

Be realistic about what, in fact, you do “every day.” I had dinner with a friend who told me, “I don’t eat dessert anymore, but that tiramisu looks so delicious that I’m going to break my rules and allow myself a piece.” He always loved sweets, so I was impressed by this self-control. “When did you give up dessert?” I asked. “Last week,” he said. He’d only gone without dessert for a few days, but in his mind, he was now a person who “never ate dessert.”

We often overestimate what we can accomplish in a short amount of time, but underestimate what we can accomplish a little bit at a time, over a long period. You’ll probably make more progress on your novel if you write for an hour a day, every day, than if you try (and usually fail) to spend your entire Sunday writing.

In most cases, the rule matters more than the exception.

family; happiness; daily life

The personal challenge presented by a white t-shirt. Preposterous.

This month’s theme is “Buy a white t-shirt; throw away a white t-shirt.” I set myself this goal because I have trouble making myself buy things I truly need or would love to possess, and once I own something, it’s hard to make myself let go of it—even when I should.

My favorite summer uniform is jeans or khakis with a v-neck white t-shirt. The burn rate on white t-shirts is pretty high, so I really should buy some new ones each year.

But instead, I hang on to the old ones too long—even when they’re looking very dingy. Because I hate to buy new shirts, I don’t want to let the old ones go.

Even though buying a white t-shirt was a key mission for July, it was July 15 before I actually managed to make a purchase.

It was only recently that I noticed that I vastly preferred white t-shirts. In the past, when I did go shopping, I’d buy a variety of colors and styles, on the assumption that I’d like some choices.

But then every morning, I’d reach for the same tired white shirts.

I’m not alone in failing to predict what I’ll want in the future. Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness describes a study in which volunteers were asked to come to the lab for a snack once a week for several weeks. Some volunteers received their favorite snack each time; some volunteers got their favorite snack most of the time, and their second-favorite snack at other times. Which group was happier? The no-variety group. People preferred to have their favorite snack each time.

In the same way, I’ve realized that every day, I will choose the white shirt. So that's what I should buy.

I find it tough to shop for myself, and I’m only somewhat better about buying needful things for my family. For example, the Big Girl was frustrated by her backpack. She’s had it for several years, and it’s too small to hold her camp impedimenta and her Tae Kwon Do uniform. As for her lunch—no way that’s going to fit.

She’s been asking for a bigger backpack since camp started, and she really needs one. And she’ll need it for school, too. But did I buy a backpack as soon as it was clear she needed it? No.

Now, I think it’s good for children to work up some real longing and anticipation. But the Big Girl needs the backpack for purely practical reasons. It’s not a treat.

I finally followed my own rule: Identify the problem. Why hadn’t I bought a backpack? Answer: I didn’t know where to buy it and dreaded hunting through a lot of stores.

As soon as I recognized the problem, I knew the solution. I have a friend who always knows where to buy all the stuff kids need: the soft insulated lunch bag, the kind of swimcap that doesn’t pull hair.

So I asked her where she bought her son’s backpack. She told me where I could buy a backpack for $15, at a store six blocks from my house. I went; I chose the blue one; I bought.

It’s one of Life’s True Rules: take advantage of someone else’s research.

science; daily life; personal; money

Tips for cheering yourself up--from 1820.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: Tips for cheering yourself up, from 1820.

In 1820, English writer Sydney Smith wrote a letter to an unhappy friend, Lady Morpeth, in which he offered her tips for cheering up. His suggestions are as sound now as they were almost 200 years ago.

“1st. Live as well as you dare.
2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 or 80 degrees.
3rd. Amusing books.
4th. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.
5th. Be as busy as you can.
6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.
7th. And of those acquaintances who amuse you.
8th. Make no secret of low spirits to you friends, but talk of them freely—they are always worse for dignified concealment.
9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.
10th. Compare your lot with that of other people.
11th. Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.
12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.
13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.
14th Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.
15th. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.
16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness.
17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.
18th. Keep good blazing fires.
19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.
20th. Believe me, dear Lady Georgiana.”