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

pop up in his e-mail in-box. By initiating a friendly exchange, I showed that I bore no hard feelings and let him off the hook. If we were ever introduced at some cocktail party, we could meet on friendly terms.
    Nevertheless, even while I was writing about happiness and focused precisely on the issue of handling criticism, I never did manage entirely to “Enjoy now” with no anxiety about the future. I spent a lot of time arguing with imaginary critics of my happiness project.
    “You have it easy,” one whispered in my ear. “No cocaine, no abuse, no cancer, no divorce, no three-hundred-pound weight loss…you didn’t even have to quit smoking!”
    “What about the millions of people who go to bed hungry?” another added. “What about people who suffer from real depression?”
    “You don’t care about plumbing the depths of your psyche.”
    “You’re not spiritual enough.”
    “The idea of a one-year experiment is stale.”
    “You just talk about yourself.”
    Oh, well, I told myself, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. If I do my project my way, I’m unspiritual and gimmicky; if I tried to do it a different way, I’d be inauthentic and fake. Might as well “Be Gretchen.”
     
    March’s focus on work and happiness highlighted a tricky issue: the relationship between ambition and happiness. There’s a common belief that happiness and ambition are incompatible. Many ambitious people I’ve known seem eager to claim that they aren’t happy, almost as a way to emphasize their zeal, in echo of Andrew Carnegie’s observation “Show me a contented man, and I’ll show you a failure.”
    Perhaps the happiness-thwarting feelings of dissatisfaction, competitiveness, and jealousy are necessary goads for ambition. If I remained ambitious, was it impossible to be happy? If my project made me happier, would I become complacent? Was the arrival fallacy an important mechanism to keep me striving?
    Studies show that many creative, influential people in the arts and public life score above average in “neuroticism” (i.e., they have a greater propensity to experience negative emotions); this discontent arguably urges them to higher achievement. Other studies, however, show that people tend to think more flexibly and with more complexity when they’re feeling happy.
    But whatever a wide-ranging study might show about the connection between ambition and happiness generally, I realized that for my own part, I was much more likely to take risks, reach out to others, and expose myself to rejection and failure when I felt happy. When I felt unhappy, I felt defensive, touchy, and self-conscious. For example, if I’d been feelingunhappy, I doubt I would have proposed forming a writers’ strategy group. I wouldn’t have wanted to open myself up to rejection or failure.
    “So,” Jamie asked one night at the end of March, as we were getting ready for bed, “do you think your project is making any difference?”
    “Oh yes,” I said without hesitation, “it’s working. Can’t you see a change?”
    “I think so,” he said. “But it’s hard to tell from the outside. You’ve always seemed pretty happy to me.”
    I was pleased to hear him say that, because the more I learned about happiness, the more I realized how much my happiness influenced the people around me.
    “I feel a little blue today myself,” he sighed.
    “You do? Why?” I said, crossing the room to put my arms around him. (As I’d learned last month, a hug is cheering.)
    “I don’t know. I just felt low all day.”
    I opened my mouth to start firing probing questions, but it was obvious that Jamie didn’t really feel like talking.
    “Well,” I said instead, “let’s turn off the light. If you’re feeling down, you’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep.”
    “Did you read a study about that?”
    “Nope, I offer that little nugget of wisdom on my own authority.”
    “Well,” he said, “I think you’re right. Let’s go to sleep.”
    It worked.

4
APRIL
    Lighten Up
    P ARENTHOOD
    Sing in the morning.
    Acknowledge the reality of people’s feelings.
    Be a treasure house of happy memories.
    Take time for projects.
     
    M y children are a tremendous source of happiness. They’ve given me some of the high points of my life and also many of the small moments that make the days happier. I’m not alone in this. Many people have told me that the very happiest moments of their lives have been the births of their