The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat” but that he “recognized the object by the symptoms it evokes.”
    Aristotle declared happiness to be the summum bonum, the chief good; people desire other things, such as power or wealth or losing ten pounds, because they believe they will lead to happiness, but their real goal is happiness. Blaise Pascal argued, “All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end.” One study showed that, all over the world, when asked what theywant most from life—and what they want most for their children—people answered that they want happiness. Even people who can’t agree on what it means to be “happy” can agree that most people can be “happier,” according to their own particular definition. I know when I feel happy. That was good enough for my purposes.
    I came to another important conclusion about defining happiness: that the opposite of happiness is unhappiness, not depression . Depression, a grave condition that deserves urgent attention, occupies its own category apart from happiness and unhappiness. Addressing its causes and remedies was far beyond the scope of my happiness project. But even though I wasn’t depressed and I wasn’t going to attempt to deal with depression in my framework, there remained much ground to cover—just because I wasn’t depressed didn’t mean that I couldn’t benefit from trying to be happier.
    Having determined that it was possible to boost my happiness level and that I knew what it meant to be “happy,” I had to figure out how, exactly, to make myself happier.
    Could I discover a startling new secret about happiness? Probably not.
    People have been thinking about happiness for thousands of years, and the great truths about happiness have already been laid out by the most brilliant minds in history. Everything important has been said before. (Even that statement. It was Alfred North Whitehead who said, “Everything important has been said before.”) The laws of happiness are as fixed as the laws of chemistry.
    But even though I wasn’t making up these laws, I needed to grapple with them for myself. It’s like dieting. We all know the secret of dieting—eat better, eat less, exercise more—it’s the application that’s challenging. I had to create a scheme to put happiness ideas into practice in my life.
     
    Founding Father Benjamin Franklin is one of the patron saints of self-realization. In his Autobiography, he describes how he designed his VirtuesChart as part of a “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.” He identified thirteen virtues he wanted to cultivate—temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquillity, chastity, and humility—and made a chart with those virtues plotted against the days of the week. Each day, Franklin would score himself on whether he practiced those thirteen virtues.
    Current research underscores the wisdom of his chart-keeping approach. People are more likely to make progress on goals that are broken into concrete, measurable actions, with some kind of structured accountability and positive reinforcement. Also, according to a current theory of the brain, the unconscious mind does crucial work in forming judgments, motives, and feelings outside our awareness or conscious control, and one factor that influences the work of the unconscious is the “accessibility” of information, or the ease with which it comes to mind. Information that has been recently called up or frequently used in the past is easier to retrieve and therefore energized. The concept of “accessibility” suggested to me that by constantly reminding myself of certain goals and ideas, I could keep them more active in my mind.
    So, inspired by recent science and by Ben Franklin’s method, I designed my own version of his scoring chart—a kind of calendar on which I could record all my resolutions and give myself a daily(good) or X (bad) for each resolution.
    After I designed my blank chart, however, it took me a long time to determine which resolutions should fill the boxes. Franklin’s thirteen virtues didn’t match the kinds of changes I wanted to cultivate. I wasn’t particularly concerned with “cleanliness” (though, come to think of it, I could do a better job of flossing). What should I do to become happier?
    First I had to identify the