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

not only for myself but also for them. I know how happy I am when one of them is very happy. How happy I was to hear Eliza say excitedly to my mother, as they were setting up an elaborate tea party, “Bunny, this is so fun! ” and to hear my mother say, “Yes, it is! ”
    As often happened with the happiness project, it was only once I vowed to stop criticizing and carping that I realized the strength of my instinct to criticize and carp. But for the love of my family and friends, so loving toward me, I tried to appear happy and especially to be so.
    A worthy model closer to home than Thérèse was my father. Nicknamed “Smilin’ Jack Craft” by my sister’s friends, one of his most lovable traits is that he is—or, I should say, he acts —unflaggingly cheerful and enthusiastic, and this makes a tremendous difference to everyone else’s happiness. One day not too long ago, when we were visiting Kansas City, my father came home from work and my mother told him, “We’re having pizza for dinner.” My father answered, “Wonderful! Wonderful! Do you want me to go pick it up?” I knew my father well enough to know that he’d answer that way even if he didn’t want pizza for dinner and even if the last thing he felt like doing was heading back out the door. This kind of unswervingenthusiasm looks easy, but when I tried to adopt that attitude myself, I realized how difficult it is. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.
    Acting happy and, even more, being happy is challenging. Furthermore—and it took me a long time to accept this perverse fact—many people don’t want to be happy or at least don’t want to seem happy (and if they act as if they’re not happy, they’re not going to feel happy). I’m not including depressed people in this category. Depression is a serious condition outside the happy/unhappy continuum. Whether in response to a particular situation, such as a job loss or the death of a spouse, or an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, or some other cause, depression is its own beast. But many nondepressed people are unhappy, and some seem to want to be that way.
    Why? It turns out there are a lot of reasons.
    Happiness, some people think, isn’t a worthy goal; it’s a trivial, American preoccupation, the product of too much money and too much television. They think that being happy shows a lack of values, and that being unhappy is a sign of depth.
    At a party, a guy said to me, “Everyone’s too worried about being fulfilled, they’re so self-indulgent. It’s there in the Declaration of Independence, and people think they should be happy. Happiness isn’t the point.”
    “Well,” I said, “now that our country has achieved a certain standard of prosperity, people set their goals on higher things. Isn’t it admirable that people want to be happy? If happiness isn’t the point, what is?”
    “Working for goals like social justice, peace, or the environment is more important than happiness.”
    “But,” I ventured, “you think it’s important to help other people, to work for the benefit of others, and of course it is—but why? Why worry about children living in poverty or malaria in Africa unless, at bottom, it’s because you want people to be healthy, safe, and prosperous—and therefore happy? If their happiness matters, doesn’t yours? Anyway,” I added, “studies show that happier people are more likely to help other people. They’re more interested in social problems. They do more volunteer workand contribute more to charity. Plus, as you’d expect, they’re less preoccupied with their personal problems. So being happy actually makes you more likely to work for the environment or whatever.”
    He laughed derisively, and I decided that the proper happiness project response was to change the subject rather than get in an argument. Nevertheless, he’d raised the most serious criticism of happiness: it’s not right to be happy when there is so much suffering in the world.
    Refusing to be happy because someone else is unhappy, though, is a bit like cleaning your plate because babies are starving in India. Your unhappiness isn’t making anyone else happier—in fact, quite the opposite, given the fact that happier people are more likely to act altruistically. That’s the circle of the Second Splendid Truth:
    One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy.
    One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself