The Happiness Project: How to Get a Quick Fix of Happiness.

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 are certain images, phrases, songs, and memories that always make me happy.

For some reason, this line from Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson strikes me as one of the funniest things I’ve ever read (and it's not even a quotation from Johnson):

"Lord Chesterfield being mentioned, Johnson remarked, that almost all of the celebrated nobleman's witty saying were puns. He, however, allowed the merit of good wit to his Lordship's saying of Lord Tyrawley and himself, when both were very old and infirm: 'Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years; but we don't choose to have it known.'"

An image that always makes me happy: the famous opening hat toss from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Mary Richards’s feeling of sudden exhilaration is familiar, but rare and precious.

A memory that always makes me happy: early in our marriage, my husband walked into our bedroom in his boxers and announced, “I am LORD of the DANCE!” and started doing that Celtic dancing. I still laugh out loud every time I think of it. He’s never done it again, though I’ve often begged him for a repeat performance.

I like keeping a mental list of these kinds of things. It’s a way of cultivating an area of refuge.

Do you have any ways to give yourself a quick fix of happiness when you need one?

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