Review of The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I recently fin­ished read­ing a fun book on hap­pi­ness (or “pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy” to sound more sophis­ti­cated about it). In spite of its obvi­ous human­is­tic tilt, I appre­ci­ated its wit­ti­ness and prac­ti­cal tips.

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, by Gretchen Rubin (301 pages), Harper, 2009.

Overview of the Hap­pi­ness Project

Maybe one of the rea­sons why I liked the book is because I’m already inter­ested in the field of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy. Keren heard about this book, and we both lis­tened to it (audio­book ver­sion). The Hap­pi­ness Project is a pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy man­ual, sold as a self-help book, and pack­aged as an auto­bi­og­ra­phy. The author, Gretchen Rubin, is on a quest for greater hap­pi­ness which leads her into a project of life-revolutionizing proportions. The author decided that she was going to take a year to improve her per­sonal hap­pi­ness. Thus, each month, Gretchen focused on a dif­fer­ent set of virtues that she called the “Twelve Per­sonal Com­mand­ments.” Plus, she had “Four Splen­did Truths” that she devel­oped along the way. Here are her Twelve Per­sonal Commandments.

• Be Gretchen.
• Let it go.
• Act the way I want to feel.
• Do it now.
• Be polite and fair.
• Enjoy the process.
• Spend out.
• Iden­tify the problem.
• Lighten up.
• Do what ought to be done.
• No cal­cu­la­tion.
• There is only love.

The book tracks her jour­ney to hap­pi­ness over the course of the year. Along the way, Gretchen grap­ples with var­i­ous the­o­ries of hap­pi­ness, grad­u­ally devel­op­ing her own. In the end, she claims that she is sat­is­fied (and happy) that she actu­ally did become hap­pier as a result of her Hap­pi­ness Project.

Lessons Learned from the Hap­pi­ness Project

• Despite the book being a man­i­festo of man’s pur­suit of ful­fill­ment apart from God, I appre­ci­ated the book for its col­lec­tion of prac­ti­cal, folksy advice. I was also keenly inter­ested in how she “achieved” a greater level of hap­pi­ness. In some ways, this book was a lot bet­ter than some of the pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy stuff I’ve read, sim­ply because it was ten times more readable.
• Rubin is no dummy. The book is easy to read, but it’s obvi­ous that she has done her home­work on pos­i­tive psychology.
• One of the weak­nesses (and poten­tial strengths) of the book, was that Gretchen freely rejected or espoused ideas on her own prag­matic prin­ci­ples, not sci­en­tific ones. In other words, if she didn’t like a the­ory of hap­pi­ness (for what­ever rea­son), or didn’t find some­thing true in her expe­ri­ence, she would reject it out of hand. (Didn’t work for me! Must not be true!) This prob­a­bly goes to demon­strate a point about per­sonal hap­pi­ness. It’s not a one-size fits all solu­tion that you can pre­scribe, describe, or explain to some­one else. It’s a per­sonal pur­suit involv­ing a per­sonal set of idiosyncrasies.
• Being, as she is, a best­selling author, an attor­ney, a Yale grad, a Yale lec­turer, and a U.S. Supreme Court jus­tice clerk, she has been, by most stan­dards, rather “suc­cess­ful.” Some would argue that it wasn’t hard for Rubin to be happy, because her life was already appar­ently pretty good.
• Of course, The Hap­pi­ness Project is also a self-help book. Thus, you’ll read a lot of plain prac­ti­cal stuff. Tips on orga­niz­ing your closet. Advice for find­ing your hob­bies. Encour­age­ment to get the sleep you need. She shares a lot of stuff that prob­a­bly res­onates with someone’s per­sonal life expe­ri­ence, but just haven’t been able to put into words. Essen­tially, The Hap­pi­ness Project is a med­ley of prac­ti­cal, folksy advice that (may or may not) improve one’s happiness.

Hap­pi­ness, Good­ness, and Beyond

One inter­est­ing fea­ture (to me) of Rubin’s quest for hap­pi­ness was the con­flu­ence of hap­pi­ness and good­ness. Although Rubin is an agnos­tic, she acknowl­edges the impor­tance of moral good­ness. Thus, her moral res­o­lu­tions are an attempt to improve her good­ness. Like Ben­jamin Franklin and chil­dren await­ing Christ­mas gifts, she made lists and checked them twice to see if she had been naughty or nice. The moti­va­tion for her good­ness came from noth­ing less than her own desire to be happy.

What I’m dis­cov­er­ing as I ply the field of pos­i­tive psy­chol­ogy is that a lot of this sec­u­lar hap­pi­ness stuff is, really, pretty shal­low. No mat­ter that Rubin quotes Aris­to­tle and pries into Thomas à Kem­pis to learn more about hap­pi­ness. Her hap­pi­ness doesn’t go deep. I admit that a cleaner closet and singing “Oh What a Beau­ti­ful Morn­ing” at 7am may con­tribute to a mer­rier time, but is this really hap­pi­ness? In read­ing pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gist Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi (Flow), I’m struck by the same thing. A Chris­t­ian the­ory of hap­pi­ness, how­ever, plunges to a far more fun­da­men­tal level—man’s nature. It soars to a higher good—God’s glory. And it acknowl­edges per­sonal human fulfillment—to “enjoy Him forever.”

When I read sec­u­lar books writ­ten by agnos­tics, I do not expect them to expos­tu­late pris­tine Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy and doc­trine. As a believer, how­ever, I can’t help but reflect on the book from a Chris­t­ian stance. In order for hap­pi­ness to be true hap­pi­ness, it has to go even deeper — deep enough to change one’s very soul, one’s very nature. If hap­pi­ness is to be found, it must be found in a life trans­for­ma­tion that a per­son could never achieve on his or her own. For the Chris­t­ian, any true the­ory of hap­pi­ness must start with an hon­est recog­ni­tion of who we are as human beings (sin­ful), and what Christ has done (atone­ment). In the end, what we receive in the atone­ment is not merely hap­pi­ness, but an infi­nite gift, pur­chased at an infi­nite price, and result­ing to the glory of God. Sadly, The Hap­pi­ness Project as a map to greater hap­pi­ness is not truly ful­fill­ing; it will not bring real, abid­ing hap­pi­ness. If you want to read it, and get some good tips for life, go right ahead. I enjoyed the book. Espous­ing Rubin’s the­ory of hap­pi­ness (which doesn’t include God) isn’t a good idea, but your closet could prob­a­bly use some clean­ing, right? Or other good stuff like that.