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Title: The Happiness Project
Author: Gretchen Rubin
Genre: Memoir/self-help
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: Writer spends a year trying to improve her happiness through concrete goals.
Thoughts: I enjoyed Rubin's run of Slate articles that supported the launch of this book a year or two ago, so when I stumbled across a copy in the library, I thought I'd give it a try.
There were some issues, certainly. To start, in the introduction she reels off a whole list of cryptic Commandments that she never really explains. (I understood some of them from her articles, but I would have been baffled otherwise.) I thought perhaps later she would tell how she arrived at these commandments and what they meant, but she just refers to them without explanation throughout the book. It was as if we'd all already read a previous book explaining them and she was just refreshing our memory. Inauspicious start.
Also, given many of the examples, she comes off as kind of high maintenance and needy. Now, there's a certain amount of self-deprecation involved, of course. And she's aware of her flaws and actively trying to mend them. But there are some passages where she's proud of her behavior and it still seems kind of obnoxious to me.
Still, I think there's a lot of useful ideas here, from the one-sentence journal to the reminders that a lot of what brings long term happiness doesn't actually make you happy in the short run, something I'm painfully aware of and yet often fail to heed. And it sparked the realization that I really am probably being too negative at work and should really work on that. It's not a deep book, but it will still provoke some self-reflection and provide some useful direction in trying to define what happiness looks like and how to go about increasing the amount of it in your life.
Author: Gretchen Rubin
Genre: Memoir/self-help
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: Writer spends a year trying to improve her happiness through concrete goals.
Thoughts: I enjoyed Rubin's run of Slate articles that supported the launch of this book a year or two ago, so when I stumbled across a copy in the library, I thought I'd give it a try.
There were some issues, certainly. To start, in the introduction she reels off a whole list of cryptic Commandments that she never really explains. (I understood some of them from her articles, but I would have been baffled otherwise.) I thought perhaps later she would tell how she arrived at these commandments and what they meant, but she just refers to them without explanation throughout the book. It was as if we'd all already read a previous book explaining them and she was just refreshing our memory. Inauspicious start.
Also, given many of the examples, she comes off as kind of high maintenance and needy. Now, there's a certain amount of self-deprecation involved, of course. And she's aware of her flaws and actively trying to mend them. But there are some passages where she's proud of her behavior and it still seems kind of obnoxious to me.
Still, I think there's a lot of useful ideas here, from the one-sentence journal to the reminders that a lot of what brings long term happiness doesn't actually make you happy in the short run, something I'm painfully aware of and yet often fail to heed. And it sparked the realization that I really am probably being too negative at work and should really work on that. It's not a deep book, but it will still provoke some self-reflection and provide some useful direction in trying to define what happiness looks like and how to go about increasing the amount of it in your life.
