Review: The Happiness Project

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

Harper Paperback 2011

297 pages

From my shelves

Gretchen Rubin was a lawyer-turned-writer who had a realization one day while heading home. She had a lot of good things in her life - a caring husband, a writing career, two beautiful daughters, close friends, and good health. She was happy...or was she? Could she be happier? Was she missing some secret formula to lessen the frustration and anxiety that she often felt? The Happiness Project is Rubin's one year journey to find out what makes people happy and apply those principles to her own life. 

You can see some of Rubin's training as a lawyer come through in these pages. A woman after my own heart, she begins her project by doing copious amounts of reading. She studied philosophy, religion, psychology and pored through both novels and biographies to find out what exactly happiness is and how people can attain it. The year was divided into twelve focuses - vitality, marriage, work, parenthood, leisure, friendship, money, eternity, books, mindfulness, and happiness. Rubin then sets up concrete goals for each month, which build on each other until December when she tries to keep all of her resolutions.

This book is very readable because Rubin herself is so relatable. She writes with humor and ease, inviting you to peek into her experiment with all of its triumphs and failures. We pick up a lot of important tidbits from her research, such as taking care of ourselves, letting things go, and working at big problems in small increments. In spite of this, I didn't love The Happiness Project.

While I read it quickly and picked up some things that I may apply to my own life, a lot of the things discussed in these pages seem like common sense. They may be bits of common sense that are hard to actually apply, but they are still principles that most of us have somewhere in the back of our brains. I tend to think that I also have trouble with these "stunt memoirs," as they are often called. There are so many books where people set out to do something for a year and I've been somewhat disappointed in the few that I have read. I think that the projects seem both too narrow and too broad and I finish the book wondering what was cut from its pages that I might have found interesting.

Is there some wisdom to be gleaned from The Happiness Project? Absolutely. Is Gretchen Rubin a pretty engaging writer? Yes, she is. But Rubin's project (and book) just didn't change my life the way it changed hers.