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

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.”

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.

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