The Happiness Project: Today is Groundhog Day -- What Day Would You Want to Re-Live?

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.”

Today, February 2, is Groundhog Day. My associations with this quasi-holiday are less about a groundhog’s prediction about the beginning of spring, and more about the movie Groundhog Day.

In the movie, Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is a cranky, cynical weatherman who, while on assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day Festival, finds himself re-living the same day, over and over again.

(Which reminds me of a scene from another movie: in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, when Mickey reflects, “Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said the life we live, we'll live over and over, the same way for eternity. Great. I'll have to sit through the Ice-Capades again.”)

Noticing that Groundhog Day was approaching prompted me to reflect: “If I had to re-live one day over and over, what would I want to do with it?” I’m such a lover of routine and familiarity that my perfect day wouldn’t be made up of anything very dramatic or exotic. Just reading in bed, for example, would take up several hours.

I asked some friends what they’d do during their perfect days, and the striking thing was how…attainable…these perfect days were. Several people distinguished between “a perfect day at home” and “a perfect day while traveling,” and one friend’s perfect “home” day was a Saturday morning trip to the green market, an afternoon trip to Whole Foods, a few hours spent cooking something challenging, and friends over for dinner. That isn’t an impossible dream! But when I asked how often she spent a day this way, she said, “I don’t know why not, exactly, but I can’t remember the last time I spent a day like that.”

So Groundhog Day makes a good yearly spur to ask: “What would my perfect day be?” It might be easier than you think to arrange it.

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A family friend wrote a very moving tribute to his wife, a year after she died of cancer.

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Interested in starting your own happiness project? If you’d like to take a look at my personal Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. (Sorry about writing it in that roundabout way; I’m trying to thwart spammers.) Just write “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

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