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

help buy happiness?” The answer: yes, used wisely, it can. Whether rich or poor, people make choices about how they spend money, and those choices can boost happiness or undermine it. It’s a mistake to assume that money will affect everyone the same way. No statistical average could say how a particular individual would be affected by money—depending on that individual’s circumstances and temperament. After a lot of thinking, I identified three factors that shape the significance of money to individuals:
    It depends on what kind of person you are.
    Money has a different value to different people. You might love to collect modern art, or you might love to rent old movies. You might have six children and ailing, dependent parents, or you might have no children and robust parents. You might love to travel, or you might prefer to putter around the house. You might care about eating organic, or you might be satisfied with the cheapest choices at the grocery store.
    It depends on how you spend your money.
    Some purchases are more likely to contribute to your happiness than others. You might buy cocaine, or you might buy a dog. You might splurge on a big-screen TV, or you might splurge on a new bike.
    It depends on how much money you have relative to the people around you and relative to your own experience.
    One person’s fortune is another person’s misfortune.
    Developing and applying a three-factor test brought back pleasant memories of being a law student, and it was a helpful framework, but it was complex. I wanted a more cogent way to convey the relationship between money and happiness.
    As I was mulling this over, one afternoon I picked up Eleanor the wrong way as I leaned over her crib, and the next morning, I woke up with agonizing back pain. For almost a month, I couldn’t sit for long, I found it hard to type, I had trouble sleeping, and of course I couldn’t stop picking up Eleanor, so I kept reaggravating the injury.
    “You should go see my physical therapist,” urged my father-in-law, who had suffered from back problems for years. “There’s a lot they can do.”
    “I’m sure it will get better on its own,” I kept insisting.
    One night as I struggled to turn over in bed, I thought, “Ask for help! Bob says that physical therapy works; why am I resisting?”
    I called Bob at work, got the information, made an appointment at the physical therapist’s office, and two visits later, I was 100 percent better. It felt like a miracle. And one day after my pain was gone, I took my health for granted once again—and I had the Epiphany of the Back Spasm. Money doesn’t buy happiness the way good health doesn’t buy happiness.
    When money or health is a problem, you think of little else; when it’s not a problem, you don’t think much about it. Both money and health contribute to happiness mostly in the negative; the lack of them brings much more unhappiness than possessing them brings happiness.
    Being healthy doesn’t guarantee happiness. Lots of healthy people are very unhappy. Many of them squander their health or take it for granted. In fact, some people might even be better off with some physical limitation that would prevent them from making destructive choices. (I once went on vacation with a group that included the most wild and recklessguy I’d ever met, and I was quite relieved when he broke his foot during an early escapade, because the mishap prevented him from getting up to much more mischief.) Ditto, money. But the fact that good health doesn’t guarantee happiness doesn’t mean that good health doesn’t matter to happiness. Similarly, money. Used wisely, each can contribute greatly to happiness.
    The First Splendid Truth holds that to think about happiness, we should think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth . Money is most important for happiness in the “feeling bad” category. People’s biggest worries include financial anxiety, health concerns, job insecurity, and having to do tiring and boring chores. Spent correctly, money can go a long way to solving these problems. I was extremely fortunate to be in a position where money wasn’t a source of feeling bad. We had plenty of money to do what we wanted—even enough to feel secure, the toughest and most precious thing for money to buy. I resolved to do a better job of spending money in ways that could boost my happiness by supporting the other three elements of