The Happiness Project: In Which I Reveal a Big Secret. Well, It's Big to Me.

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.”

It's time to admit that I’ve been keeping a secret from my blog. Now all will be revealed! At last, it’s time to confess…not only am I working on a new book, I actually just handed in the draft to my editor! I’ve been working on it for a long time! (I know, this secret may not seem quite as earth-shattering to you as it does to me.)

Happiness is an inexhaustibly fascinating subject; I’d just begun to plumb its depths by the time I’d finished my last book. I wanted to pursue the subject more deeply -- but how?

For the first project, I had to develop a framework to understand happiness, and I took a wide, encompassing approach. For this new project, I wanted to go narrower, and deeper. I wanted to put some striking concept at the center, to find a single lens through which to view happiness. But what should that idea be?

As I was pondering this question, I recalled one of my favorite lines from Samuel Johnson: “To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.” HOME! That’s what’s most important to me, I realized. To be happy at home.

Happier at Home is about what I did to try to be happier at home. I was pretty happy when I started -- happier than when I started The Happiness Project -- but still, I knew I could be happier.

Why am I announcing this today? Well, today my two daughters headed back to school, to start seventh grade and first grade, and I'm reminded, once again, of my Third Splendid Truth: The days are long, but the years are short. (Of everything I’ve written about happiness, I think this piece, as short as it is, is the one that resonates most with people.) Now is the time to be happier.

And for me, throughout my life, September’s back-to-school atmosphere has always given me a new zeal for self-examination and self-mastery. Those fresh clean notebooks, that new schedule...everything seems possible. I make resolutions at New Year’s, and also in September.

For that reason, Happier at Home spans a school year. From September through May, I work on being happier at home, with themes like Possessions, Time, Marriage, Interior Design, Parenthood, Neighborhood, Body, Now.

Happier at Home will come out next August.

Ah, it feels good to talk about it!

What do you think? Does it grab your interest? How do you like the subject and the title? (Subtitle is still a work in progress.) Each time I write a book, I think sadly, "Alas, no book will ever be as much fun to write as this book. It's all downhill from here." And each time, I've loved my next book even more. And so it is with Happier at Home. It is such a joy to write this book.

* Good news, bad news. Good news: Colleen Wainwright successfully hit her goal for her fiftieth birthday, to raise $50,000 in 50 days for WriteGirl, a project to which she's deeply committed. Bad news: now she has to keep her promise and shave her head -- bald! Learn more about the fabulous "50-for-50 project" here.

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