Homer's Travels: Book: Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project"

Friday, October 03, 2014

Book: Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project"

Who doesn't want to be happy.  The question is, how does one go about increasing their happiness?  That is sort of what Gretchen Rubin's "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" attempts to answer.

The book is a personal account of how she created a resolutions chart and filled it with resolutions that would, based on her research, increase her happiness.  Each month she tackles another aspect of her life - marriage, having fun, work, etc. - adding four or five resolutions to her chart.  By the end of the year she has accumulated over forty resolutions.

At the end of the year while she considers herself happier, her husband didn't totally agree with her.  Having said this, I think she sounded happier and I suspect her husband was just not perceptive enough to notice the change.

There are a lot of ideas in this book that you can use.  The book is not a how-to kind of manual though.  It is a memoir.  The book is full of  I-I-I.  I tried this.  I did that.  I changed my attitude. I-I-I.  At times this was annoying but it is what it is.  Having said this she writes about many ways to improve her happiness and some of her stories resonated with me.

Will I start my own happiness project?  Probably not.  It felt like a lot of work.  I will think about many of the ideas listed in the book and, who knows, I may find a way to add a little more happiness in my life because who among us couldn't use a little more happiness in their lives

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