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

computer, preparing to “put myself in jail” to cope with my frustration and my desire to rush. Instead, the whole process took about twenty minutes.
    When my self-published book arrived a few weeks later, it exceeded my wildest expectations. There was my baby journal! As a real book! What next? I did a book of my favorite quotations about the nature of biography, I did a book of my favorite uncategorized quotations, and I fantasized about future books. When I finished my research on happiness, I’d print out a book of my favorite happiness quotations; maybe I could even include photo illustrations. I’d make a book of my blog posts. I’d print out my novel, Happiness . I’d print up my one-sentence journal—I could even make copies for the girls! Plus I had so many ideas for great happiness-related books. If I couldn’t publish them with a real publisher, I would publish them myself.
    I also learned that through Shutterfly, an online photo ser vice site, I could print a hardback photo album. Figuring out how to do this turned out to be challenging, but eventually I mastered it, and once I was done, I ordered a copy for us and the grandparents, and everyone received a neat, organized book, stuffed with photos. Although it was expensive, I reminded myself that not only was I keeping my resolution to “Master a new technology,” I was also keeping my resolutions to “Make purchases that will further my goals,” “Indulge in a modest splurge,” and “Be a treasure house of happy memories.”
    And once I got through the painful learning curve, it was fun. The novelty and challenge of mastering the technology—though I was maddened with frustration at times—did give me enormous satisfaction, and it gave me a new way to pursue my passion for books.
     
    Of all the months so far, September’s resolutions had been the most pleasant and easiest to maintain. This showed me, once again, that I was happier when I accepted my own real likes and dislikes, instead of trying to decide what I ought to like; I was happier when I stopped squelching the inclinations toward note taking and bookmaking that I’d had since childhood and instead embraced them. As Michel de Montaigne observed, “The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”
    I needed to accept my own nature—yet I needed to push myself as well. This seemed contradictory, but in my heart, I knew the difference between lack of interest and fear of failure. I’d seen this in March with my blog. Although I’d been nervous about launching a blog, I did recognize that running a blog is the kind of thing I would like to do. In fact, I realized, my work on my childhood Blank Books, where I had pulled together interesting information, copied quotations, and matched text with striking images, sounded an awful lot like…posting to my blog. Sheesh. In fact, once I realized that, I decided to give up working on my new Blank Book. I’d had fun working on it since May, and I’d gotten a nostalgic kick from resuming an activity that had given me so much pleasure in childhood, but I’d grown tired of it. My blog had taken its place as an outlet to record the odds and ends I felt compelled to gather.
    On the very last day of the month, I had an important realization: my Fourth Splendid Truth. Jamie and I were having dinner with a guy we knew slightly. He asked me what I was working on, and after I described the happiness project, he said, in polite disagreement, that he himself subscribed to John Stuart Mill’s view—and he gave the precise quotation from Mill, I was impressed—“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”
    One of the problems of thinking about happiness all the time is that I’ve developed rather decided views. I wanted to pound the table and yell, “No, no, NO!” Instead, I managed to nod and say in a mild voice, “Yes, a lot of people take that view. I can’t say that I agree.”
    I could see it in the guy’s face: John Stuart Mill v. Gretchen Rubin . Hmmm…who’s more likely to be right? But, in my experience at least, thinking about happiness had made me far happier than I was before I gave happiness much consideration. Now, Mill may have been referring to the state of “flow” identified by the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In flow, it’s true, people are completely absorbed, so focused on their tasks that they forget