The Happiness Project, Tenth Anniversary Edition
Kindle Highlights
War and Peace.
whether popcorn,
KEEP A GRATITUDE NOTEBOOK.
“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,”
Thérèse of Lisieux. Story of a Soul,
“Don’t expect praise or appreciation.”
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
The days are long, but the years are short.
“The days are long, but the years are short”
“Junk attracts more junk. If you clear it off, it’s
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated by A. Maude.
review mentioned the “newly popular genre” of “stunt
If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
But the fact is, you can’t change anyone but yourself.
Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. New York: Villard, 1996.
I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can’t DO EVERYTHING I want.
Laugh out loud. ▪ Use good manners. ▪ Give positive reviews.
By doing a little bit each day, you can get a lot accomplished.
“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”
Medieval monks kept images of skeletons in their cells as memento mori.
“Whatever we want. The Giver, The Secret Garden, James and the Giant Peach,
The Dalai Lama’s The Art of Happiness was the book most often recommended to me.
Seneca. Letters from a Stoic. Translated by Robin Campbell. New York: Penguin, 1969.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Washington, D.C.: Gateway Editions, 2000.
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
It takes at least five positive marital actions to offset one critical or destructive action,
Make Time for Friends Friendship ▪ Remember birthdays. ▪ Be generous. ▪ Show up. ▪ Don’t gossip.
Aim Higher Work ▪ Launch a blog. ▪ Enjoy the fun of failure. ▪ Ask for help. ▪ Work smart. ▪ Enjoy now.
take pleasure in the “atmosphere of growth,” in the gradual progress made toward a goal, in the present.
▪ Quit nagging. ▪ Don’t expect praise or appreciation. ▪ Fight right. ▪ No dumping. ▪ Give proofs of love.
Epicurus. The Essential Epicurus. Translated by Eugene Michael O’Connor. New York: Prometheus Books, 1993.
To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right. So simple, yet so profound.
To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
Acknowledge the reality of people’s feelings. ▪ Be a treasure house of happy memories. ▪ Take time for projects.
Experts say that denying bad feelings intensifies them; acknowledging bad feelings allows good feelings to return.
“Nothing,” wrote Tolstoy, “can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”
Mark 4:25: For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.
Remember, friends, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I. As I am now, so you must be. Prepare yourself to follow me.
One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you.
It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that if you have something you love or there’s something you want, you’ll be happier with more.
Pierre Reverdy: “There is no love; there are only proofs of love.” Whatever love I might feel in my heart, others will see only my actions.
January Boost Energy Vitality ▪ Go to sleep earlier. ▪ Exercise better. ▪ Toss, restore, organize. ▪ Tackle a nagging task. ▪ Act more energetic.
One fact of human nature is that people have a “negativity bias”: we react to the bad more strongly and persistently than to the comparable good.
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.
Cowen, Tyler. Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. New York: Dutton, 2007.
going to a monthly writers’ meeting. In the past, I think I might have shied away from pursuing these goals, because I wouldn’t have wanted to deal with rejection.
Resolving to be a “treasure house of happy memories” also got me thinking about the importance of family traditions. Family traditions make occasions feel special and exciting.
Generous acts strengthen the bonds of friendship, and what’s more, studies show that your happiness is often boosted more by providing support to other people than from receiving support yourself.
Epicurus agreed, albeit in slightly more poetic phraseology: “Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Good Life. Translated by Michael Grant. New York: Penguin, 1971. Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. New York: Riverhead, 1998.
more experienced authors reminded me that any review is just one person’s opinion, and in the end the reviews vanish with the next day’s papers while the books endure (which is why we write books, in part).
To counteract this fear, I told myself, “I enjoy the fun of failure.” It’s fun to fail, I kept repeating. It’s part of being ambitious; it’s part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
—I’d been going there several times a week for seven years—but my brief absence reminded me how much I loved it (thus proving the advice of happiness experts, who advocate periods of deprivation to sharpen pleasures).
Tidying up at night made our mornings more serene and pleasant and, in an added benefit, helped prepare me for sleep. Putting things in order is very calming, and doing something physical makes me aware of being tired.
Extroversion: response to reward Neuroticism: response to threat Conscientiousness: response to inhibition (self-control, planning) Agreeableness: regard for others Openness to experience: breadth of mental associations
I’d read about a “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” class that claimed to be able to change the way in which people processed visual information so anyone could learn to draw. Perfect. I figured that, as with laughter yoga,
“When you buy any kind of device, put the cords, the manual, all that stuff in a labeled Ziploc bag. You avoid having a big tangle of mystery cords, plus when you get rid of the device, you can get rid of the ancillary parts, too.”
“How was the movie?” Instead of following my inclination to say, “Well, not bad,” I answered, “It was such a treat to go see a movie in the afternoon.” That’s a response that’s much more likely to boost happiness—not only in her but also in me.
I had come to understand one critical fact about my happiness project: I couldn’t change anyone else. As tempting as it was to try, I couldn’t lighten the atmosphere of our marriage by bullying Jamie into changing his ways. I could work only on myself.
In marriage, it’s less important to have many pleasant experiences than it is to have fewer unpleasant experiences, because people have a “negativity bias”; our reactions to bad events are faster, stronger, and stickier than our reactions to good events.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
Seligman, Martin. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press, 2002. . What You Can Change and What You Can’t: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement. New York: Knopf, 1993.
For our first meeting, I sent around an e-mail inviting everyone to my apartment for dinner to discuss C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At the end of the e-mail, I included a quotation from Lewis’s brilliant essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”:
Because money permits a constant stream of luxuries and indulgences, it can take away their savor, and by permitting instant gratification, money shortcuts the happiness of anticipation. Scrimping, saving, imagining, planning, hoping—these stages enlarge the happiness we feel.
I also started hugging Jamie more—as well as other people in my life. Hugging relieves stress, boosts feelings of closeness, and even squelches pain. In one study, people assigned to give five hugs each day for a month, aiming to hug as many different people as they could, became happier.
Happier people also make more effective leaders. They perform better on managerial tasks such as leadership and mastery of information. They’re viewed as more assertive and self-confident than less happy people. They’re perceived to be more friendly, warmer, and even more physically attractive.
there’s an intriguing difference in how men and women approach intimacy. Although men and women agree that sharing activities and self-disclosure are important, women’s idea of an intimate moment is a face-to-face conversation, while men feel close when they work or play sitting alongside someone.
William Butler Yeats. “Happiness,” wrote Yeats, “is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal attainment but the process of striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.
Books such as Peter Pan, The Golden Compass, and The Blue Bird operate on a symbolic level and are penetrated with meanings that can’t be fully worked out. Adult novels do sometimes have this atmosphere, but it’s much rarer. I love to return to the world of stark good and evil, of talking animals and fulfilled prophecies. But
packed. I didn’t agree with Tolstoy’s observation that “Happy families are all alike,” but perhaps it was true that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Although many of these memoirs described a similar circumstance—grappling with a life-threatening condition—each was memorable for its story of unique suffering.
“Whoever is merry and cheerful has always a good reason for so being, namely the very fact that he is so. Nothing can so completely take the place of every other blessing as can this quality, whilst it itself cannot be replaced by anything. A man may be young, handsome, wealthy, and esteemed; if we wish to judge of his happiness, we ask whether he is cheerful.”
In his book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar describes the “arrival fallacy,” the belief that when you arrive at a certain destination, you’ll be happy. (Other fallacies include the “floating world fallacy,” the belief that immediate pleasure, cut off from future purpose, can bring happiness, and the “nihilism fallacy,” the belief that it’s not possible to become happier.)
A friend told me that when she lived in Russia in the 1990s, the hot water would periodically stop working for weeks at a time. She said that very few experiences in her life have matched the happiness she felt on the days when the hot water started working again. But now that she’s back in the United States, where her hot water has never failed, she never thinks about it.
Enthusiasm is more important to mastery than innate ability, it turns out, because the single most important element in developing an expertise is your willingness to practice. Therefore, career experts argue, you’re better off pursuing a profession that comes easily and that you love, because that’s where you’ll be more eager to practice and thereby earn a competitive advantage.
“You basically eat a very healthy diet, so why give up fake food altogether? Limit yourself to a few treats each week.” “Nope, can’t do it!” I told her. “I know myself too well to try that.” When it comes to fake food, I’m like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” In other words, I can give something up altogether, but I can’t indulge occasionally.
I remember talking to a friend whose parents had been very involved in the civil rights movement. “They always said,” he told me, “that you have to do that kind of work for yourself. If you do it for other people, you end up wanting them to acknowledge it and to be grateful and to give you credit. If you do it for yourself, you don’t expect other people to react in a particular way.” I think that’s right.
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.”
Botton, Alain de. How Proust Can Change Your Life. New York: Vintage International, 1997. Frankl, Victor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Penguin, 2007. Jacobs, A. J. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
I turned to music—another dormant part of my mind. According to research, listening to music is one of the quickest, simplest ways to boost mood and energy and to induce a particular mood. Music stimulates the parts of the brain that trigger happiness, and it can relax the body—in fact, studies show that listening to a patient’s choice of music during medical procedures can lower the patient’s heart rate, blood pressure, and anxiety level.
Just in time, I remembered my resolution, “Acknowledge other people’s feelings.” Although I knew that it wasn’t factually true that no one ever paid any attention to Eliza, I managed to restrain my first impulse, which was to argue, “What about the five games of Uno I played with you last night?” and “You know everyone loves you just as much as Eleanor.” Instead, I said, “Wow, that hurts your feelings. You feel ignored.” That seemed to help.
A common theme in religion and philosophy, as well as in catastrophe memoirs, is the admonition to live fully and thankfully in the present. So often, it’s only after some calamity strikes that we appreciate what we had. “There are times in the lives of most of us,” observed William Edward Hartpole Lecky, “when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.”
Don’t say “no” or “stop.” Instead, I try to give information that shows that although I understand their desire, I have a reason for not granting it: “You’d like to stay, but we have to go home because Daddy forgot his keys.” Studies show that 85 percent of adult messages to children are negative—“no,” “stop,” “don’t”—so it’s worth trying to keep that to a minimum. Instead of saying, “No, not until after lunch,” I try to say, “Yes, as soon as we’ve finished lunch.”
Crazily enough, I discovered, just repeating what my child was saying, to show that I appreciated her point of view, was often enough to bring peace. Instead of saying to Eleanor, “Don’t whine, you love to take a bath!” I said, “You’re having fun playing. You don’t want to take a bath now, even though it’s time.” This strategy was astoundingly effective—which suggested to me that much of children’s frustration comes not from being forced to do this or that but rather from the sheer fact that they’re being ignored.
Studies show that merely being conscious of eating makes people eat more healthfully, and one way to encourage yourself to eat more mindfully, experts agree, is to keep a food diary. Without a record, it’s easy to overlook what you eat without noticing it—grabbing three Hershey’s Kisses every time you pass a coworker’s desk throughout the day or eating leftovers from other people’s plates as you clear the kitchen table. In one study, dieters who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as dieters who didn’t bother.
I’d noticed idly that a lot of people use the term “goal” instead of “resolution,” and one day in December, it struck me that this difference was in fact significant. You hit a goal, you keep a resolution. “Run a marathon” makes a good goal. It’s specific, it’s easy to measure success, and once you’ve done it, you’ve done it. “Sing in the morning” and “Exercise better” are better cast as resolutions. You won’t wake up one day and find that you’ve achieved it. It’s something that you have to resolve to do every day, forever.
My biggest happiness boosts had come from eliminating the bad feelings generated by my snapping, nagging, gossiping, being surrounded by clutter, eating fake food, drinking, and all the rest. In particular, it made me happier to be in better control of my sharp tongue. Nowadays I often managed to pause and change my tone, just a second before I started to rant, or to change my tone in midsentence. I’d even managed to laugh while chiding Jamie—about not dealing with the insurance forms or not looking for his missing library book.
“All knowledge is interesting to a wise man,” and I often thought that if I took some time to learn more about the political situation in the Middle East, the architecture of Louis Sullivan, or the legacy of John Marshall, I would find these subjects very interesting. And probably I would. But then I think—well, I’d like to like Bach’s music more than I do, and I could probably make myself like it better if I tried, but I don’t like having to try to make myself like things. I want to spend more time on the things that I already like.
When I thought back on the experience of writing my Churchill biography, for example, the most thrilling moment came when I was sitting at a study table at the library where I do most of my writing and I read two lines from Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940: “We shall go on to the end . . . we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.” As I read, the thought occurred to me, “Churchill’s life fits the pattern of classical tragedy.” This realization gave me such an ecstatic shock of recognition that tears welled up in my eyes.
But my passionate interest in kidlit didn’t fit with my ideas of what I wished I were like; it wasn’t grown up enough. I wanted to be interested in serious literature, constitutional law, the economy, art, and other adult subjects. And I am interested in those topics, but I somehow felt embarrassed by my love of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. L. Konigsberg, and Elizabeth Enright. I repressed this side of my personality to such a degree that when one of the Harry Potter books came out, I didn’t buy it for several days. I’d fooled even myself into thinking that I didn’t care.
dumping. ▪ Give proofs of love. One alarming fact jumps out from the research about happiness and marriage: marital satisfaction drops substantially after the first child arrives. The disruptive presence of new babies and teenagers, in particular, puts a lot of pressure on marriages, and discontent spikes when children are in these stages. Jamie and I had been married for eleven years, and sure enough, the incidence of low-level bickering in our marriage increased significantly after our daughter Eliza was born. Until then, the phrase “Can’t you do it?” had never crossed my lips.
First of all, by the time you’ve arrived at your destination, you’re expecting to reach it, so it has already been incorporated into your happiness. Also, arrival often brings more work and responsibility. It’s rare to achieve something (other than winning an award) that brings unadulterated pleasure without added concerns. Having a baby. Getting a promotion. Buying a house. You look forward to reaching these destinations, but once you’ve reached them, they bring emotions other than sheer happiness. And of course, arriving at one goal usually reveals another, yet more challenging goal.
“I’d like the Greek salad, chopped, no dressing, no olives or stuffed grape leaves, plus a side order of grilled chicken and a side order of steamed broccoli.” When the food arrived, she heaped the chicken and broccoli onto the salad. It was a lot of food, but tasty and very healthy. I ordered the same salad, but without the extra chicken and broccoli. Before we dug in, we sprinkled artificial sweetener over our salads. (She taught me this trick. It sounds awful, but artificial sweetener makes a great substitute for dressing. It’s like adding salt; you don’t taste it, but it brings out the flavor of the food.)
The aspect that intrigued me most, however, was the study of Zen koans (rhymes with Ben Cohen’s). A koan is a question or a statement that can’t be understood logically. Zen Buddhist monks meditate on koans as a way to abandon dependence on reason in their pursuit of enlightenment. The most famous koan is “Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?” Another is “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” Or “What was your face before your parents were born?” A koan can’t be grasped by reason or explained in words; meditating on koans promotes mindful thinking because it’s not possible to comprehend their meaning with familiar, conventional logic.
As I read, I love to take notes—often for no apparent reason. I’m always marking up books, making odd lists, gathering examples in strange categories, copying passages. For some reason, I like working on some permanent, undefined research project. I feel compelled to make lists of foreign words that describe concepts that English can’t convey (flâneur, darshan, eudaimonia, Ruinensehnsucht, amae, nostalgie de la boue), explanations of concepts that I find queerly charged with significance (the Fisher King, the westerly road, Croatoan, Eleusinian Mysteries, offering of first-fruits, the hunting of the wren, the Corn-Spirit, sparagmos, the Lord of Misrule, cargo cult, Greek herm, potlatch, the Golden Ratio), and hundreds of other topics.
Many activities that I consider enjoyable aren’t much fun while they’re happening—or ahead of time or afterward. Throwing a party. Giving a performance. Writing. When I stop to analyze my emotions during the various stages of these activities, I see procrastination, dread, anxiety, nervousness, annoyance at having to do errands and busywork, irritation, distraction, time pressure, and anticlimax. Yet these activities undoubtedly make me “happy.” And so it is with raising children. At any one time, the negative may swamp the positive, and I might wish I were doing something else. Nevertheless, the experience of having children gives me tremendous fog happiness. It surrounds me, I see it everywhere, despite the fact that when I zoom in on any particular moment, it can be hard to identify.
Fighting style is very important to the health of a marriage; Gottman’s “love laboratory” research shows that how a couple fights matters more than how much they fight. Couples who fight right tackle only one difficult topic at a time, instead of indulging in arguments that cover every grievance since the first date. These couples ease into arguments instead of blowing up immediately—and avoid bombs such as “You never . . .” and “You always . . .” They know how to bring an argument to an end, instead of keeping it going for hours. They make “repair attempts” by using words or actions to keep bad feelings from escalating. They recognize other pressures imposed on a spouse—a husband acknowledges that his wife feels overwhelmed by the demands of work and home; a wife acknowledges that her husband feels caught between her and his mother.
When Thérèse was in the convent, her “Mother” was her older sister Pauline, who instructed Thérèse to write the story of her childhood, which became the basis of Story of a Soul. In 1897, at the age of twenty-four, Thérèse died an agonizing death from tuberculosis. While she lived, no one outside her family and convent had heard of Thérèse. After she died, an edited version of her memoir was sent to Carmelite convents and Church officials as an obituary notice. Just two thousand copies were printed initially, but the popularity of this “Springtime Story of a Little White Flower,” as she’d characteristically titled it, spread with astonishing rapidity; just two years after her death, her grave had to be placed under guard to protect it from pilgrims seeking relics. (It’s hard to understand how such a short, modest account of childhood and youth could have such spiritual power—yet of course I feel it myself.)
were reading children’s literature for ourselves. I loved our kidlit tradition that the dinner’s host must serve some food that tied in with the book. This started when I served Turkish delight for dessert at the first meeting, because Turkish delight plays a significant role in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. At our next meeting, we drank Tokay, the wine that appears at a key moment in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (I was surprised to discover that Tokay was real; I’d assumed it was part of Lyra’s world). For Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we ate mock turtle soup and treacle tart; for Blue Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer, the blue M&M’s that are the signature candy eaten by Petra and Calder; for Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Meg’s blancmange, which Jo takes to Laurie the first time they meet. At the dinner to discuss Louis Sachar’s Holes, we ate Dunkin’ Donuts doughnut holes—for the pun.
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.
Thérèse intensely disliked one of her fellow nuns, Teresa of Saint Augustine, whom Thérèse described, without identifying her, as “a Sister who has the faculty of displeasing me in everything, in her ways, her words, her character.” Instead of avoiding her, Thérèse sought out this nun at every turn and treated her “as if I loved her best of all”—so successfully that this sister once asked Thérèse, “Would you tell me . . . what attracts you so much toward me; every time you look at me, I see your smile?” After Thérèse’s death, when this disagreeable nun gave her testimony during the process of Thérèse’s beatification, she said smugly, “At least I can say this much for myself: during her life I made her really happy.” Teresa of Saint Augustine never knew that she was the unlikable sister mentioned in Story of a Soul until thirty years later, when the chaplain, in a fit of exasperation, told her the truth. It’s a little thing, of course, but anyone who has ever suffered from a whiny coworker, a narcissistic roommate, or interfering in-laws can appreciate the heavenly virtue that befriending such a person would require.
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 themselves at the perfect balance of challenge and skill. But I think that Mill meant, or people generally believe, that thinking about your happiness makes you self-absorbed; you’re not thinking about other people, work, or anything other than your own satisfaction. Or perhaps Mill meant that happiness comes as a consequence of pursuing other goals, such as love and work, and shouldn’t be a goal in itself.
Gretchen argues throughout The Happiness Project that striving to be happy is a worthy, not selfish, goal. Do you agree? Do you think that Gretchen was right to devote so much time and attention to her own happiness? Why or why not? Do you spend much time thinking about your happiness? The Happiness Project is packed with quotations. Which quotation resonated most with you? Do you have a quotation that has been particularly meaningful in your own life, one that you’ve included in your e-mail signature or taped to your desk, for example? One of Gretchen’s resolutions is to “Imitate a spiritual master.” Do you have a spiritual master? Who is it? Gretchen was surprised to realize that Saint Thérèse of Lisieux was her master. Do you know why you identify with your spiritual master? Gretchen observes that outer order contributes to inner calm, and many of her resolutions are aimed at clutter clearing. Do you find that clutter affects your happiness? One of Gretchen’s main arguments is “You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy,” and she spends a lot of time thinking about her happiness. However, many important figures have argued just the opposite. For example, John Stuart Mill wrote, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” What do you think? Does striving for happiness make you happier, or does it make happiness more elusive? Did reading this book make you want to try any of the resolutions? If so, which ones? A criticism of The Happiness Project might be that writing a “year of . . .” book is gimmicky. Did you like the “experiment for a year” approach, or did it strike you as a cliché? Why do you think so many authors are drawn to this structure? Many memoirs recount the author’s struggle to be happy in the face of a major challenge like cancer, divorce, an unhappy childhood, and the like. In the book’s opening, Gretchen notes that she has always been pretty happy. Nevertheless, did you find her reflections on happiness helpful? Or do you think it’s more valuable to read an account by someone facing more difficulties? Gretchen writes, “Everyone’s happiness project will be different.” How would your happiness project be different from Gretchen’s? How might it be the same? What was the one most valuable thing you learned from The Happiness Project about happiness—for yourself?