The Happiness Project: When is the right time to think about happiness? Before or after a catastrophe strikes?

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.”

Wheel When I started The Happiness Project blog, something worried me: I feared that people who faced major happiness challenges – like a serious illness, job loss, chronic pain, divorce, addiction, depression -- would be put off by this site. Would they think: Who was I to talk about happiness, when everything in my life was fine? How helpful could my views be, unless I faced circumstances that made it very difficult to be happy?

I realized, however, that one of my main goals for my happiness project was to prepare for adversity — to develop the self-discipline and the habits to deal with a bad thing when it happened. Because that wheel was going to turn. The time to start exercising, stop nagging, and work on photo albums, I decided, is when everything was going smoothly; I didn’t want to wait for a crisis to re-make my life.

Since March 2006, when this blog launched, I’ve been very gratified to hear from many readers who wrote to let me know that the strategies I talk about here did help them during particularly hard times. I’d be very interested to hear people’s views on this topic. Are you more likely to think about happiness – and to take action to try to build happiness – when everything in your life is going well, or when you’re facing a catastrophe?

If you’re facing a catastrophe, does it help to think about taking little, ordinary steps to build happiness (having lunch with a friend, making your bed in the morning, going outside for a quick walk)? Or are activities like that dwarfed by the magnitude of what you’re facing?

My hope is that the Happiness Project (blog and book) can help people trying to be happier within their ordinary life, and also help people trying to be happier in the context of a major happiness challenge.

If some particular resolution or approach has helped you deal with a big happiness challenge, I’m sure it would be helpful for everyone to hear about what worked for you – if it’s not too private.

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Lots of interesting material at My Simpler Life.

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