The Happiness Project and How Happiness Doesn’t Always Make You Happy
Happiness is a funny thing. Once we have it, we can’t seem to have enough of it. We always want more and fight to have as much of it as we can. The desire to be happy seems to be an endless ambition of humanity - so much so that the American Founding Fathers even wrote the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right in their Constitution for their new American country. I don’t blame us. If allowed to choose between any two emotions, happiness is generally more preferred for most situations than not.
But as “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin taught me, happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy.
“The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin is a non-fiction self-help book documenting the author’s attempt at improving happiness in her life by following a resolutions chart and improving aspects of her life on a month to month timeline for a year based on a specific theme. For one month, she improves her relationship with her family. For another month, she looks at her finances and attempts to see if money can truly buy happiness. While I found a lot of her experiments were inaccessible to folks without disposable income or a flexible schedule, there were some aspects of the book that I enjoyed that contributed to my own journey to growing happiness in my life.
One enjoyable aspect that I wished the author explored more was the concept that happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy. As I reflect on the new year, working on my resolutions to improve my life and make me happier, I am grateful to realize that this is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I enjoy my career, my dog, my friends, my family, and just my life in general. But the only way I was able to find this happiness was by being unhappy. In fact, I was miserable for several years. I made poor decisions with the relationships in my life that ruined what could’ve been meaningful connections. When I attempted to publish my first book via the traditional publishing route, I got my heart broken by over 300 rejections by agents and publishers. I suffered with semi-diagnosed anxiety that I mostly ignored for most of my life until fairly recently. I’ve spent more time crying in my car than I probably care to admit.
But those tiny miseries made my life better in the long run. I learned from my mistakes and moved forward with them to find my happiness. If you read my blog post about how teaching myself how to cook made me a better person, you’ll know that things take time to improve and develop. You have to burn some bread when learning how to make toast and you might still burn your toast even after becoming a master chef. That’s perfectly fine. We’re all human and we all want to be happy. But in order to be happy, you have to learn how to live with a little bit of misery.
It’s natural to avoid the discomfort of misery. Being sad or mad or scared or uncomfortable is intentionally not a pleasant experience for your body. But in order to move forward and know what will make you happy, you have to experience what makes you unhappy. You can’t deny negative emotions or experiences in your pursuit for happiness. If you pretend that nothing is wrong and you can remain happy despite the negative situation or dodge those experiences that will create discomfort, you’re denying yourself the opportunity to acknowledge those unhappy feelings and learn what will make you make happy more consistently in your life.
If I didn’t have the heartbreaking experience of over 300 rejections for my first (still unpublished) book, I never would’ve explored self-publishing my actual first book “How to Survive a Ghost Story” which was tremendously more satisfying of a challenge for me. I authentically enjoyed designing the cover, navigating the various sales channels required for self-publishing, and creating a marketing plan based on my existing micro-influencer social media network. Ghost Story’s success also led me down my current path where I get to write and publish my books in my own way, in my own time, and under my own name with my own publishing company which is a freedom I adore claiming. But again, it’s not a happiness I would’ve experienced without the first horrible misery of having 300 separate book professionals tell me that my writing wasn’t good enough to be experienced by readers. (To be fair, that manuscript probably wasn’t ready for reader consumption so good call on the traditional publishers’ part, but it was still miserable for me to experience that sheer level of mass rejection.)
In a more general sense, unhappiness is required for the little things too. I legitimately don’t think anyone enjoys working out. The act of exercising is generally supposed to be miserable as it is meant to physically exert your body to its breaking point, but the results from exercising can improve someone’s life and make them happy. Breaking up is very rarely an enjoyable experience for either party, but the ability to move forward and seek a more satisfying relationship that doesn’t involve the same level of dissatisfaction can improve a life and make someone happy. Sometimes, you need to do something while scared in order to accomplish the task that will make you happier in the long run and those create unhappy feelings too.
Happiness continues to be humanity’s most elusive conquest. You have to be miserable to acquire it sometimes and then once you have it, you put yourself in more misery seeking more of it. If you have the means and/or energy to theme a year of your life around improving your happiness level like Gretchen Rubin did, then absolutely go for it. It never hurts to try to improve your happiness wherever or however you can, even if it’s just buying yourself a little treat on a bad day. Just don’t be afraid to be a little unhappy during your pursuit of happiness. You’ll never know where it’ll lead you.
For me, my personal happiness project will continue to involve resisting social media since I’ve truly found myself in a better mental state with my reduced social media activity, cultivating my existing relationships while growing in new ones, and engaging my community and the outside world more. Oh! And also reading every possible book I can get my hands on. I do love reading a good book. And also bad books. And audiobooks. Really, all books. I love books. Books make me happy (but also a little unhappy sometimes).