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

Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously—and also more seriously. I wanted to use my time well, but I also wanted to wander, to play, to read at whim. I wanted to think about myself so I could forget myself. I was always on the edge of agitation; I wanted to let go of envy and anxiety about the future, yet keep my energy and ambition. Elizabeth’s observation made me wonder about my motivations. Was I searching for spiritual growth and a life more dedicated to transcendent principles—or was my happiness project just an attempt to extend my driven, perfectionist ways to every aspect of my life?
    My happiness project was both. I wanted to perfect my character, but, given my nature, that would probably involve charts, deliverables, to-do lists, new vocabulary terms, and compulsive note taking.
     
    Many of the greatest minds have tackled the question of happiness, so as I started my research, I plunged into Plato, Boethius, Montaigne, Bertrand Russell, Thoreau, and Schopenhauer. The world’s great religions explain the nature of happiness, so I explored a wide range of traditions, from the familiar to the esoteric. Scientific interest in positive psychology has exploded in the last few decades, and I read Martin Seligman, Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Gilbert, Barry Schwartz, Ed Diener, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Sonja Lyubomirsky. Popular culture, too, is bursting with happiness experts, so I consulted everyone from Oprah to Julie Morgenstern to David Allen. Some of the most interesting insights on happiness came from my favorite novelists, such as Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, and Marilynne Robinson—in fact, some novels, such as Michael Frayn’s A Landing on the Sun , Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto , and Ian McEwan’s Saturday , seemed to be the careful working out of theories of happiness.
    One minute I was reading philosophy and biography; the next, Psychology Today. The pile of books next to my bed included Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink , Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments , Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden , the Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness , and “FlyLady” Marla Cilley’s Sink Reflections . At dinner with friends, I found wisdom in a fortune cookie: “Look for happiness under your own roof.”
    My reading showed me that I had to answer two crucial questions before I went any further. First, did I believe it was possible to make myself happier? After all, the “set-point” theory holds that a person’s basic level of happiness doesn’t fluctuate much, except briefly.
    My conclusion: yes, it is possible.
    According to current research, in the determination of a person’slevel of happiness, genetics accounts for about 50 percent; life circumstances, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income, health, occupation, and religious affiliation, account for about 10 to 20 percent; and the remainder is a product of how a person thinks and acts. In other words, people have an inborn disposition that’s set within a certain range, but they can boost themselves to the top of their happiness range or push themselves down to the bottom of their happiness range by their actions. This finding confirmed my own observations. It seems obvious that some people are more naturally ebullient or melancholic than others and that, at the same time, people’s decisions about how to live their lives also affect their happiness.
    The second question: What is “happiness”?
    In law school, we’d spent an entire semester discussing the meaning of a “contract,” and as I dug into my happiness research, this training kicked in. In scholarship, there is merit in defining terms precisely, and one positive psychology study identified fifteen different academic definitions of happiness, but when it came to my project, spending a lot of energy exploring the distinctions among “positive affect,” “subjective well-being,” “hedonic tone,” and a myriad of other terms didn’t seem necessary. I didn’t want to get stuck in a question that didn’t particularly interest me.
    I decided instead to follow the hallowed tradition set by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who defined obscenity by saying “I know it when I see it,” and Louis Armstrong, who said, “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know,” and A. E. Housman, who wrote that he “could