The Happiness Project

A year ago, I discovered what I thought was my non-evil twin--a woman named Gretchen Rubin who is from Kansas City and happened to be writing a book on happiness. Only instead of endlessly carping about things, as I usually do, she fills her blog with advice on how we can improve our outlook.
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 (HarperCollins 2009) hit the shelves last December.
The lengthy subtitle pretty much sums it up. Rubin's idea seems to be that if you just change yourself enough--if you stop nagging, remember everyone's birthday, start exercising, organize your closets, make more time for your kids while at the same time getting to bed earlier--you will feel happier.
She knows it works because in the end, she does feel happier. She backs that up with anecdotes written by readers of her blog who have followed her plan, which includes charts in which you grade yourself daily on how you're doing. (I'll go out on a sexist limb here. It seems really unlikely that many men would take all this trouble.)
You see, Rubin recently lost her job and is recovering from a serious illness and...no wait. I've got that wrong. Rubin was editor of the Yale Law Journal and clerked for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor but now writes books and lives in New York with her husband and two children, whose two sets of doting grandparents visit often.
Then one day on a bus, it hit her. She just wasn't happy enough. She should try to do better. The huge list of new chores and duties was not really an expression of guilt and self punishment for her success. It really wasn't
Okay, okay. I won't go down the sarcasm road. Rubin is well aware that there are plenty of people worse off than she is. She makes that point early on.
So I want to give her the benefit of the doubt. But I have to point out that she doesn't always make it easy.
The cocktail party on page 13, for instance. An acquaintance attacks her idea.
"And anyway," he persisted, "you're not a regular person. You're highly educated, you're a full-time writer, you live on the Upper East Side, your husband has a good job. What do you have to say to someone in the Midwest?"
Yes, the Midwest. That hellhole where regular people live who don't have good jobs or a lot of education. And they also don't have cocktail parties.
I can never imagine this conversation without turning it into a little movie. After that line, the camera would weave through the living room, past the canapes, picking up bits of conversations along the way. Some well-dressed men are gathered in a corner. The punch line: "...and we were selling those things, and I mean they were hot. But all they were was worthless paper. What are you gonna tell the people in the Midwest?" (Fade to sounds of uproarious laughter)
There's also this sentence: "But when my clerkship with Justice O'Connor drew to a close, I couldn't figure out what job I wanted next."
Why does that irritate me so much? It's not an unreasonable thought. I guess I just can't help applying it to people I know. "When I was laid off after 20 years, I couldn't figure out what job I wanted next."
Which brings me to the central point. The Happiness Project is the victim of horrible, horrible timing and questionable editorial judgment.
The research and blog were started back in early 2006. March of that year is the first entry in Rubin's blog archives.
The biggest recession in our generation's memory started, by most accounts, in 2007. The stock market went into crisis in fall of 2008.
At that point, someone should have said, "maybe we ought to rethink this. It seems like the obstacles to happiness right now are bigger than cluttered closets and lack of exercise. People are losing their homes. If we print this, people are liable to say your projects are just icing roses on your wedding cake of a life."
Toward the end of the book, Rubin does try to address that. She says she wants to develop happier habits now, so she can fall back on them when something bad does happen.
I'm skeptical about that. The mild discontent she's dealing with now will have no relationship whatever to severe loss that could happen in the future. And if the bad thing is something financial, it will be harder still, because many of her projects involve buying something--a spot in an exercise class, a file box, bluebirds for her collection.
I just don't have the faith that these things will make her better able to ward off the blues in bad times. Because I know it doesn't work.
I used to do this sort of thing, but in reverse. As a kid, I'd imagine in vivid detail all the very worst things that could happen to me and my family, and how I might deal with them. I thought of this as a sort of vaccination against the schizophrenia that struck my mother in her 20s. In my child's mind, I thought she must gotten sick because she was not prepared enough for bad things. My mental constitution was going to be stronger.
Did it make me less neurotic as an adult? You can ask my friends. But I sorta doubt it.
Her more compelling argument is that she wants to be able to say she appreciated the good times while she had them. That, I can't argue with.
Rubin had a great opportunity in The Happiness Project. She had the ear of a book publisher and an agent. And she had a historic moment in history--a time when we all could use some happiness.
What we needed was something more.
What we got was a bestseller.