The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

despair, you let go of a lot. And you realize, experientially, that life is way too short NOT to follow your passion. So, that’s what I do these days.
     
    As I’m growing up, I’m learning how important doing what you love is to your happiness. My BIG goal is to find a way to make money doing what I love. I’m 22 and two years into the corporate world, but my passion is designing and making jewelry. I’m starting small making custom jewelry for family and friends, and I just launched an online shop at etsy.com. I’ve loved designing jewelry for a while, but only recently have I gottenthe courage to truly chase after my passion. Although I’m nowhere near having a viable business, I hope to eventually! Sometimes it gets frustrating to see that my goal is just a tiny seed right now; but having a vision of what I want it to become keeps me motivated to just go for it without giving up! Working hard for something that you are passionate about is SO satisfying and adds so much genuine happiness to life.
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    You might experiment with new recipes, go camping in your fifteenth state park, plan a sixtieth birthday party, or watch your favorite team progress to the Super Bowl. I liked writing a novel.
    MAKE TIME.
    Although reading was one of my most important priorities and certainly one of my greatest pleasures, I never really gave it much thought. I wanted to make more time to read—more books, with more enjoyment. To do so, I gave myself permission to read at whim. Samuel Johnson observed, “If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” Science backs this up. When researchers tried to figure out what helped third-and fourth-graders remember what they read, they found that the students’ interest in a passage was far more important than the “readability” of the passage— thirty times more important.
    So between the books I read for happiness research, such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, Anne Lamott’s Plan B, and some biographies of Tolstoy, I threw in Lesley Lewis’s The Private Life of a Country House 1912–1939. Along the same lines, I let myself reread William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charlotte Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe, and Laura Ingalls Wilder whenever I had the urge, instead of steering myself to read something new. I’ve always thought that the best reading is rereading. Ipushed myself to keep reading lists. I asked people for recommendations (as a side benefit, this turned out to be a relationship booster; people responded warmly when I wrote down their suggestions). On the advice of a fellow member of the children’s literature book group, I subscribed to Slightly Foxed, a charming British quarterly that publishes people’s essays about their favorite books, and I noted suggestions from the magazine The Week ’s “The Book List” section.
    But the main hurdle keeping me from reading more wasn’t the problem of figuring out what to read but rather having enough time to read. No matter how much time I spent reading, I wanted more. Of course, whenever anyone complains of not having enough time, the first suggestion is always “Watch less TV.” Which makes sense—the average American spends between four and five hours watching TV each day.
    “Do you think we watch too much TV?” I asked Jamie.
    “We hardly watch any TV,” he said.
    “Well, we do watch some. What do you think, five or six hours a week? But we only watch what we’ve TiVo’d or from a DVD.”
    “I don’t think we should give up all TV,” he said. “TV is great—if you’re not watching in a stupid way.”
    He was right. It was fun to watch a show once the girls were asleep. Watching TV seemed more companionable than reading in the same room; I suppose the fact that we were sharing the same experience made it seem cozier.
    I did, however, vow to stop reading books that I didn’t enjoy. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started—no longer. And just as I used to make myself finish every book, I used to keep every book I bought, and we had messy stacks on every surface of our house. I culled ruthlessly, and we dropped off several heavy bags of books at a thrift store. I also accepted my idiosyncratic reluctance to read any book (or see any play or movie) that centers on the theme of unjust accusation. I was never going to be able to force myself to read Oliver Twist,