Action for Happiness

One of the books I admire is Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Its subtitle is Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. (A new, ten-year-anniversary edition of the book was published recently.)

Like many of us, Rubin was interested in being as happy in life as possible, and while that has been a pursuit of human beings for centuries, she had the advantage of relatively recent research on what actually makes people happy. That research, it turns out, debunks a lot of conventional wisdom on the subject. Rubin took twelve of the research findings and applied them for a month at a time in her own life, and kept a blog along the way. The book was an outcome of that year-long project.

I knew a woman several years ago who, when she retired from her job as a college professor, thought that she would be happy in retirement because she would no longer have any professional obligations — no more staff meetings, PhD mentorships, or departmental administrative assignments. She was careful not to replace her professional obligations with new obligations. She didn’t want to grant anyone a right to expect her to do something she didn’t wish to do. If she made no commitments, she figured, no one could hold her to whatever she’d committed to. You can anticipate the punch line here:  she did not have a happy retirement.

We could view our entire lives as a series of pursuits for which the ultimate objective is happiness: getting our driver’s license, obtaining a diploma, getting a particular job, then a better job, then a promotion, meeting the person of our dreams, getting married, having kids, buying a house, then a bigger house, and a nicer car. Many people, like the woman described above, assume retirement is life’s ultimate reward, a time when we’ll be able to do only those things that make us happy. That could be true, assuming one has sufficient savings to do what one wants to do, but in retirement as in all of life, discerning what’s actually going to make us happy is not always easy.

The so called “wisdom literature” — religious and philosophical texts throughout the ages — contains a lot of good advice about how to live a happy life. Unfortunately it also contains a good portion of nonsense, and separating the chaff from the grain can be a challenge.

But in the last few decades, psychologists and social scientists have systematically pursued an evidence-based understanding of human happiness. For anyone who cares to learn what that research tells us, as Gretchen Rubin did, it provides at least a place to start in understanding how we can make life happier for ourselves and others. (A caveat here is that much of these learnings are applicable only for those of us who already enjoy lives of relative privilege, as opposed to the fear and destitution suffered by many people in the world.)

I can forgive those who view people who are concerned with their own happiness as overly self-centered, but an interesting irony is that being self-centered and self-indulgent doesn’t actually engender happiness. In fact, the greatest happiness is often achieved when we prioritize the well-being of other people above our own comfort and convenience.

What prompted me to write about this now, 10 years after reading Gretchen Rubin’s book, is that I just learned about an organization called “Action for Happiness,” whose purpose is to “help people take action for a happier and kinder world.” That resonates with me because, as I’ve noted before, I see happiness and kindness as going hand in hand. The organization’s website, actionforhappiness.org, offers a range of suggestions for actions we can take to promote our own happiness and that of others, and contains a list of “10 Keys to Happier Living.” I’d encourage anyone, even the happiest among us, to spend at least a few minutes looking at what they have to say.