Gretchen Rubin has not experienced a grave
injustice, a major personal tragedy, nor suffered a terrible illness. She has not lost her home, job, money, or a
member of the family.
In fact, Rubin believes herself to have so much to
be happy about. She is married to the
love of her life, has two delightful daughters, is a writer living in New York,
and has close relationships with her family.
She, however, “suffer bouts of melancholy,
insecurity, listlessness, and free floating guilt.” She is experiencing what
she calls, a “midlife malaise – a recurrent sense of discontent and almost
feeling of disbelief, ‘Can this be me?’ ”.
Rubin’s “The Happiness Project” is not so much
about searching for happiness but of wanting to be happier in a state of
plenty. Rubin embarked on a year-long project to find answers. She did not do this by travelling around the
world like Hector in Francois Lelord’s, “Hector and the Search for Happiness”; neither
did she reside abroad for a time, similar to what Jamie Cat Callan undertook in,
“Bonjour Happiness” to unlock the secret to joie
de vivre.
Instead, Rubin gathered an armload of books and
applied what she learned to her
day-to-day activities (Jamie, her husband, has been a favorite guinea pig in
her experiments/resolutions). Her
monthly projects looked like this:
January – Boost energy
February – Remember love
March – Aim higher
April – Lighten up
May – Be serious about play
June – Make time for friends
July – Buy some happiness
August – Contemplate the heavens
September – Pursue a passion
October – Pay attention
November – Keep a contented heart
December – Boot camp perfect
Rubin is an engaging writer, affable, honest, self-deprecating
in some parts, and defensive in other segments. She has taken pains to explain why a Yale law
school graduate like her who used to be editor of the Yale Law Review and who
clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is not out there litigating or closing
multi-million dollar deals, but chosen instead to write books.
Reading “The Happiness Project”, one is struck why people
like Rubin, who look like they have it all, while not unhappy, are not quite
happy. Rubin partly provides the explanation in asking a rhetorical question: “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?”
There are neither outstanding revelations nor
mind-boggling new theories in “The Happiness Project”. It is however, replete with all sorts of
entertaining statistics, studies, and quotations.
-
An extra hour of sleep each night would do more
for a person’s daily happiness than getting a US$60,000 raise
-
Just by exercising 20 minutes a day, 3 days a
week for 6 weeks, persistently tired people boost their energy
-
Happier people make more effective leaders
-
“Where there is no wood, the fire goes out; and
where there is no talebearer, strife ceases.” (Proverbs 26:20)
-
“Fundamental attribution error” is a
psychological phenomenon in which we tend to view other people’s actions as
reflections of their characters and to overlook the power of the situation to
influence their actions, whereas with ourselves, we recognize the pressure of
circumstances
-
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
(Woody Allen)
-
“On the whole, though I never arrived at the
perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell short of it, yet as I
was, by endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been
had I not attempted it.” (Benjamin Franklin)
The book is akin to walking in a sunlit park with
birds chirping and flowers all a-blooming. There are no dark demons in this book.
The only hints of evil were references to gossip mongering and Jamie’s medical
condition.
POSTSCRIPT:
I need to say this. Rubin did her
readers a disservice when she included in her book a considerable number of comments from her blog. To
paraphrase Matthew 22:21, “Render unto the blog, the observations of the bloggers
and unto the book the remarks of the blurbers.”
