The Happiness Project (29 page)

Some people associate happiness with a lack of intellectual rigor, like the man who said to Samuel Johnson, “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Creativity, authenticity, or discernment, some folks argue, is incompatible with the bourgeois complacency of happiness. But although somber, pessimistic people might
seem
smarter, research shows that happiness and intelligence are essentially unrelated.

Of course, it’s
cooler
not to be too happy. There’s a goofiness to happiness, an innocence, a readiness to be pleased. Zest and enthusiasm take energy, humility, and engagement; taking refuge in irony, exercising destructive criticism, or assuming an air of philosophical ennui is less taxing. Also, irony and world-weariness allow people a level of detachment from their choices: fast food, a country club membership, a gas-guzzling SUV,
reality TV. I met someone who couldn’t stop talking about the stupidity of celebrities and people who read celebrity gossip, but her disdainful remarks revealed that she herself followed it very closely. I had to bite my tongue not to quote Samuel Johnson’s observation of Alexander Pope: “Pope’s scorn of the Great is too often repeated to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.” Ironic commentary was her strategy both to embrace and to disavow celebrity gossip.

Other people cultivate unhappiness as a way to control others. They cling to unhappiness because without it they’d forgo the special consideration that unhappiness secures: the claim to pity and attention. I know I’ve pled unhappiness to get points for something. For example, if Jamie asks me to go to a business dinner with him and I honestly tell him, “I don’t want to go, I
really
don’t want to go, but I will if you want me to,” I feel as if I get more gold stars from him for going than if I fibbed, “I’m happy to go, I’m really looking forward to it.” If I didn’t complain, if I didn’t express my unhappiness, Jamie might take my complaisance for granted.

Some people exploit unhappiness for decades. “My mother always made a big point that she’d sacrificed completing her Ph.D. program to stay home with me and my brother,” a friend told me. “She was frustrated and angry, and she brought it up all the time. She used her unhappiness to control us and my father. We all felt guilty.”

The belief that unhappiness is selfless and happiness is selfish is misguided. It’s more selfless to act happy. It takes energy, generosity, and discipline to be unfailingly lighthearted, yet everyone takes the happy person for granted. No one is careful of his feelings or tries to keep his spirits high. He seems self-sufficient; he becomes a cushion for others. And because happiness seems unforced, that person usually gets no credit. Thérèse didn’t get credit, even from her fellow nuns, for her tremendous efforts. Because she seemed so happy, they assumed that her behavior was effortless. I know a fortunate few people—such as my father—who seem naturally sunny-tempered. Now I wonder how effortless this really is.

There’s yet another group of people who have a superstitious dread of admitting to happiness, for fear of tempting fate. Apparently, this is practically a universal human instinct and seen in nearly all cultures—the dread of invoking cosmic anger by calling attention to good fortune. This feeling haunted me as I worked on my happiness project. By directing attention at my happiness, was I somehow putting it at risk?

There’s the related superstition that if you anticipate trouble and tragedy, you’ll somehow forestall it. Fear and worry can be useful, because thinking about unpleasant consequences can prompt prudent actions, such as wearing a seat belt or exercising. But for many people, fear of what
might
happen is a source of great unhappiness—yet they feel there’s a propitiatory virtue in fretting. For example, on some level, I feel guilty about not worrying more about Jamie’s hepatitis C. I keep track of every piece of information we get, I go to many of Jamie’s appointments, I’ve learned a lot about hepatitis C. But when it isn’t an active issue in our lives, I don’t think much about it, and sometimes my detachment seems…irresponsible. Shouldn’t I be more concerned? But my worry won’t change the reality of Jamie’s liver. Whipping myself up into a frenzy of fear, however, would make both Jamie and me unhappy. (On the other hand, some believe that if you allow yourself to be
unhappy,
terrible things will happen—most likely cancer. This kind of thinking isn’t new. During the Great Plague of London in 1665, for example, people believed that staying cheerful would ward off infection.)

Last, some people are unhappy because they won’t take the trouble to be happy. Happiness takes energy and discipline. It is easy to be heavy, etc. People who are stuck in an unhappy state are pitiable; surely they feel trapped, with no sense of having a choice in how they feel. Although their unhappiness is a drag on those around them—emotional contagion, unfortunately, operates more powerfully for negative emotions than for positive emotions—they suffer, too.

Philosophers, scientists, saints, and charlatans all give instruction on how to be happy, but this doesn’t matter to a person who doesn’t
want
to
be happy. If you don’t believe you’re happy, you’re not. As Publilius Syrus observed, “No man is happy who does not think himself so.” If you think you’re happy, you are. That’s why Thérèse said, “I take care to appear happy and especially
to be so.
”

One of the key underlying purposes of this month’s resolutions and my entire happiness project was to be able to bear up courageously when the phone rang with bad news—as inevitably, it would.

Well, bad news did come, right at the end of the month.

My mother called. “Have you talked to Elizabeth?” she asked.

“No, not for about a week,” I answered. “What’s up?”

“Well, she has diabetes.”

“Diabetes?”

“Yes. Type 2, they think, but they’re not sure. It’s lucky they diagnosed her when they did—her blood sugar level was dangerously high.”

“How did she figure it out? What happens now? Why did she get it?” Every random thing I knew about diabetes began zipping through my mind: the responsiveness of type 2 to changes in diet and behavior; the tensions that had arisen in the diabetes community between advocates for type 1 and type 2 over allocation of research money; memories from sixth grade, when I watched my friend injecting herself in her stomach with insulin. My mother told me what she knew. Then I called my sister to hear her tell the story over again.

Over the next several weeks, the news kept changing. At first the doctors thought Elizabeth had type 2, even though she doesn’t fit the usual profile—she’s young, thin, fit. That diagnosis was a blow, but two things cushioned it. First, she’d been feeling lousy, and getting her blood sugar under control made her feel much better. Also, we were relieved that she didn’t have type 1, which requires daily insulin and can’t be alleviated by diet and exercise. Well—it turned out she
did
have type 1.

When people are faced with serious setbacks, a psychological mecha
nism kicks in to help them see positive aspects in the situation, and I could feel myself starting to search for opportunities for “posttraumatic growth.” With various resolutions ringing in my ears, I tried to keep perspective and feel gratitude. “It’s so lucky they caught it when they did,” I told Elizabeth. “You’ll be eating well and exercising regularly. You’ll get this under control, you’ll get used to it, and you’ll do great.”

Elizabeth deployed the downward-comparison strategy.

“Yes,” she said. “And think about all the other things it
could
have been. The diagnosis could have been so much worse. Diabetes really is manageable.” What she didn’t say, and I didn’t say, was that sure, it could have been a lot worse—but it also could have been
nothing at all.

After college, my roommate was in a bad car accident, and I flew out to Hawaii to see her. She was wearing a halo brace with bolts drilled into her skull.

“Do you feel lucky to be alive?” I asked.

“Well, actually,” she said, “I feel like I really wish I hadn’t been in a damn car crash.”

It’s not easy to stay focused on the positive. But I think that my resolutions did help me cope with this news. What if I’d been the one diagnosed with diabetes? I think they would have helped even more. A common eighteenth-century epitaph reads:

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.

A true happiness project sentiment.
Now,
I kept reminding myself, is the time to keep my resolutions. Because the telephone is going to ring again.

Pursue a Passion

B
OOKS

Write a novel.

Make time.

Forget about results.

Master a new technology.

R
eturning from vacation made me appreciate my beloved library anew. This library, just one block from my apartment, is perfect: a beautiful building, open stacks, Internet access, a terrific children’s section, and a quiet study room in which to do my writing—and boy, is that room quiet. I still remember the glares I got one morning when I forgot to mute the start-up tones on my laptop. It was easy to take the library for granted—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).

Given my happiness to be back at the library—and also September’s association with the beginning of the school year—it was appropriate that this month revolve around books. My chief resolution for the month was to “Pursue a passion,” which in my case meant everything related to books. I love reading and writing, and my work centers on reading and writing, yet these activities still get crowded out of my time.

Long ago, I read the writer Dorothea Brande’s warning that writers are too inclined to spend their time on wordy occupations like reading, talking, and watching TV, movies, and plays. Instead, she suggested, writers should recharge themselves with language-free occupations like listening to music, visiting museums, playing solitaire, or taking long walks alone. That made sense to me, and I’d sporadically tried to follow that advice. But during the period when I was preparing for my happiness project, while browsing in a bookstore, I had a glaringly obvious realization: for better or worse, what I loved to do was to read, to write, and to make books—really, if I was honest, to the exclusion of practically any other activity.

A while back, a friend with three children mentioned to me, “On the weekends, I like a day when we all spend at least two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon playing outside.”

“On the weekends,” I answered, “I like a day when we all lie around reading in our pajamas until after lunch.” True—but I felt bad about it. Why? Why did I think her inclinations were superior? Why do I feel guilty for lying around, “just reading”? Probably because that’s what comes most naturally to me. I
wish
I were different, that I had a wider range of interests. But I don’t. Now, though, it was time to be more thoughtful about pursuing my passion for reading and writing. To me, that sounded like a lot more fun than playing outside. (Of course, until Eleanor was older, mornings spent reading would be pure fantasy, but we’d had them before, and we’d have them again.)

To keep this month’s resolution to “Pursue a passion,” I first had to recognize my passion. Done. My next step was to make time for it, to find ways to integrate my passion into my ordinary days, and to stop measuring
myself against some irrelevant standard of efficiency. I also wanted to learn to master some of the new technology that makes bookmaking easy.

Not everyone shares my particular passion, of course; instead of books, it might be college football, or community theater, or politics, or garage sales. But whatever your passion might be, happiness research predicts that making time for a passion and treating it as a real priority instead of an “extra” to be fitted in at a free moment (which many people practically never have) will bring a tremendous happiness boost.

One thing I learned from my blog, however, was that some people feel overwhelmed by the question “What’s your passion?” It seems so large and unanswerable that they feel paralyzed. If so, a useful clue to finding a passion to pursue, whether for work or play, is to “
Do
what you
do.
” What you enjoyed doing as a ten-year-old, or choose to do on a free Saturday afternoon, is a strong indication of your passion. (One blog reader pointed to an even more basic indicator: “Actually very similar to advice from a physics professor of mine, who said, ‘What do you think about when you’re sitting on the toilet? Because that’s what you *want* to think about.’”) “Do what you do” is helpful because it points you to examining your behavior rather than your self-conception and therefore may be a clearer guide to your preferences.

WRITE A NOVEL.

My most ambitious project for the month was to write a novel. In thirty days. I’d never had the urge to run marathons or climb mountains, but the thought of completing a novel in a month filled me with the same kind of lust for the thrill of exertion. I wanted to find out whether I could do it.

A while back, when I’d run into an acquaintance on the street, she’d mentioned that she was writing a novel in a month.

“You are?” I asked, immediately intrigued. “How?”

“I got this book,
No Plot? No Problem!
by Chris Baty. You start without
any preparation, you don’t edit yourself, and by writing 1,667 words a day, you write a fifty-thousand-word novel in thirty days.”

“Fifty thousand words?” I asked. “Is that long enough to be a real novel?”

“That’s as long as
The Catcher in the Rye
or
The Great Gatsby.
”

“Really? You know,” I said slowly, “I might try it, too.”

“He also started National Novel Writing Month. That’s in November. Lots of people all over the country do it.”

We were standing on a street corner one block from the Barnes & Noble at Union Square. “I’m going to buy the book right now,” I said, making up my mind. “I really am going to think about it.”

I bought the book, and I came up with an idea: two people having an affair in Manhattan. I’d been reading Laurie Colwin, Roxana Robinson, and other novelists writing about the problems of middle marriage, and I wanted to think about the happiness and unhappiness consequences of a middle-marriage crisis like an affair. Also, I thought it would be fun to try to think through the logistics of how two people in the same social circle would keep their affair a secret and to write about New York City.

On the first day of September, I typed HAPPINESS on the title page and wrote my first sentence: “When she thought about it later, Emily realized that she knew exactly when her affair with Michael Harmon had its start: about 8:00 p.m. on the night of September 18, at a cocktail party at Lisa and Andrew Kessel’s apartment.” And so on, for 1,667 words.

Writing the novel was a lot of work, but I had less trouble squeezing the writing into my day than I’d expected. Of course I had it easier than most people, since I was already a full-time writer, but even so, I had to scrimp on time otherwise spent reading newspaper and magazines, meeting people for coffee, reading for fun, or generally puttering around. My blog posts became noticeably shorter.

After the first ten days, I ran into a problem: I’d reached the end of my plot. I hadn’t thought of much action—Emily and Michael have lunch, they start an affair, they end their affair—and I’d already written most of
that story before I’d hit even 25,000 words. Baty’s book promised that I wouldn’t have trouble coming up with more story, and somehow I kept going. And going. Each day, one way or another, I managed to eke out the minimum word requirement, until on September 30, I typed the sentence, “She’d do her shopping at a different drugstore. THE END.” I calculated the word count: 50,163 words. I’d finished a novel that was long enough to be a real book—as long as some of my favorite novels, like Flannery O’Connor’s
Wise Blood
and Chuck Palahniuk’s
Fight Club
.

It was a huge amount of work, plunked on top of everything else I needed to accomplish in my days. Did it make me happy? It sure did. Writing
Happiness
took a lot of time and energy, it’s true, but it gave me a substantial boost in happiness. Tackling such a big project and carrying it through to the end in a single month contributed hugely to the atmosphere of growth in my life. It was thrilling to see what I could accomplish in a short time if I put my mind to it. Also, because I was always searching for material that could enrich the story, the world came alive to me in a new way. On my way home from the library one afternoon, I saw a large crowd milling around in front of the famous Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. “This would make a great scene for my novel,” I thought.

But perhaps the most acute source of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea—the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture. I remember the precise moment when the idea struck me. I’d been at a dinner party with several couples who lived in my neighborhood. I’d seen two of my friends engaged in an intense, surely innocent conversation, and I’d thought, “What if they were having an affair? How could they pull it off? What would happen?” Always before, it had taken me years to write books that I’d envisioned. This novel might not be very good, but I’d completed it in one month.

As I’d seen in February with Extreme Nice, the boot-camp approach has many advantages. The brilliant Scott McCloud suggests a similar exercise, “The 24-Hour Comic,” in his book
Making Comics:
“Draw an entire 24-page comic book in a single 24-hour period. No script. No prepara
tion…. Great shock therapy for the creatively blocked.” The boot-camp approach also gave me a sense of creative freedom, because I realized that when I had the uncontrollable urge to write a novel—a little-discussed but widespread occupational hazard that affects many writers—I could just sit down and
do
it.

And, to my surprise, writing
Happiness
was fun. Usually when I’m writing, I constantly question my work. With novel-writing month, I couldn’t take the time, and it was a relief to be free from my inner critic. As one friend told me, “Face it, your novel is probably terrible—but that’s okay!” This project helped me to keep my March resolution to “Enjoy the fun of failure.” After I’d written the 50,163rd word, I was immediately itching to go back and edit it—but I resisted. I didn’t even reread it. At some point, I will.

Writing a novel provided the “atmosphere of growth” that, I was becoming more and more convinced, was essential to happiness; I’d included this element in my First Splendid Truth, but it was even more significant than I’d initially understood. The satisfaction gained from the achievement of a large undertaking is one of the most substantial that life affords. When I asked blog readers if tackling a big goal had ever brought them happiness, many people wrote to share their own experiences: