Book Club: The Happiness Project

Happiness keeps you from dying from a lot of terrible things. Ain’t I a happy broad?
—Phyllis Diller, age 92, quoted in The New Yorker, Jan. 11, 2010

Happiness, by its nature, is fleeting—and it’s supposed to be. “Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own,” says psychologist Daniel Gilbert. “But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live.” In a 2007 article, Gilbert explains that our emotions are a compass, cueing us to potential benefits and risks of our actions. “What good is a compass if it’s always stuck on north?” Gilbert asks.

In her new book, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin undertakes a life-tweaking mission: to create a set of rules and behaviors that will increase her daily happiness. She’s not trying to stick her emotional compass permanently on north. Rather, Rubin approaches happiness as a scientist might. Her hypothesis: by creating a set of rules and behaviors to follow, she will be able to measure their impact on her daily moods.

Rubin realizes how fortunate she is. She and her family are financially secure; she has a loving husband and two healthy daughters; she has her dream job (writing); she lives on the Upper East Side in New York City. She’s not depressed. But she often feels cranky, snaps at loved ones, or feels resentful or underappreciated. There’s an undercurrent of discontent beneath the bedrock of her fulfilled existence.

In this book, and on her popular blog, Rubin chronicles her attempt to find a formula for happiness. She reads everything she can find on the topic, from positive-psychology studies to ancient philosophical texts. Based on her research and on sheer gut instinct, she creates dozens of happiness resolutions: for example, “Go to sleep earlier,” “Quit nagging,” and “Ask for help.” She then assigns several resolutions to each month of the upcoming year, and charts her performance using a calendar on which she gives herself a daily ✓ (good) or X (bad). (You can see a sample chart here.)

I was worried that I’d get annoyed reading a well-off woman’s complaints. But the book isn’t like that. Rubin’s voice, while slightly neurotic and driven, is also likeable. She gently mocks herself for her super-analytical approach to happiness, and for getting evangelical with the people around her. (At one point, having felt a tremendous burst of energy from cleaning her own closets, she starts pushing her clutter-clearing talents onto not-so-willing friends.)

Rubin also takes happiness seriously—and that takes courage. As she writes: “Of course, it’s cooler not to be too happy. There’s a goofiness to happiness…irony and world-weariness allow people a level of detachment from their choices.” Trading coolness for happiness is an admirable choice.

Two components of the book weaken its appeal. First, Rubin doesn’t seem to have decided whether this is science for laypeople, or a lighthearted memoir. The phrases “studies show” and “research shows” appear a lot—but with no indication of what studies and what research. For example, Rubin tells her husband, “[I]n a 2006 study, eighty-four percent of Americans ranked themselves as ‘very happy’ or ‘pretty happy.’” But there’s no footnote showing the study she’s referencing, and she writes the scene as conversational dialogue, blurring the lines between memoir and science writing. There is a suggested reading list in the back of the book—but it’s difficult to connect claims in the text to specific studies.

Some references actually weaken Rubin’s arguments. “Research shows that regularly having fun is a key factor in having a happy life; people who have fun are twenty times as likely to feel happy,” she writes, but again, there’s no way to trace what she’s referring to. Rubin is actually making a subtle point here about the difference between fun and happiness—but I wanted her to do a better job of unpacking the research she cites. How exactly did anyone conclude scientifically that fun leads to happiness?

A bigger problem is that Rubin includes comments from readers of her blog, which she created while researching the book. This is, in many ways, a book built from a blog (a “blook”?), and that creates two pitfalls. First, it feels as if we’re listening in on a book-club discussion before the book’s even been finished. And, her readers’ comments make Rubin sound less confident. She has plenty to offer without incorporating other (mostly weaker) voices.

But these flaws don’t seriously compromise The Happiness Project. It’s a fast, fun read, surprisingly touching in places. Rubin mentions that she’s trying to store up happiness now, so that she’ll be better prepared if disaster strikes in the future. (Though she doesn’t mention it, there is some psychological basis for this notion.)

In the end, Rubin’s scientific approach—charting her own behaviors and seeing how they make her feel—might be what’s most useful to anyone trying to bump up their own happiness levels.