What's the Happiness Project?

The Happiness Project began as a yearlong experiment to pursue happiness, based on the advice of sages past and present, from Aristotle to Oprah Winfrey [source: The Stimulist]. A quick glance at any quotations database on the Web reveals that throughout the ages, great thinkers and ordinary people alike have offered plenty of opinions about happiness. The author Leo Tolstoy, for example, said, "If you want to be happy, be" [source: Quote Garden]. Mark Twain, on the other hand, suggested, "The best way to make yourself happy is to try to cheer somebody else up" [source: Quote Garden].

It became Rubin's mission to test as many of these ideas as possible within one year. To carry out her project, she quit her job to become a writer, which is how she conveyed her findings. Originally, The Happiness Project was conceived as a social experiment that would result only in a book chronicling Rubin's year. As the blogosphere became more popular and readily accessible, however, Rubin began to keep daily entries on her blog, happiness-project.com.

Rubin's daily interaction with readers created what she considers a "movement" [source: Rubin]. It would certainly appear that way; she's regularly interviewed by other bloggers and her posts appear on major Web sites like the Huffington Post, Slate and Psychology Today. The Happiness Project has also developed a wide following. The site has 3,000 members as of July 2009 and physical support groups are forming in cities around the United States [source: Facebook].

Through her experimentation with dispensing advice on happiness, Rubin managed to sort through that worked and what didn't, which has made her something of a lay expert on the subject. Put together, her experiences have culminated in bite-sized revelations like her Twelve Happiness Commandments (number one: "Be Gretchen," number six: "Enjoy the process") and her Splendid Truths (Splendid Truth Number Three: "The days are long, but the years are short") [source: Rubin, Rubin].

Rubin's Happiness Project isn't merely about following her own bliss, however. She observes the previously mentioned quote from Mark Twain and regularly pays her own happiness forward. She uses her blog to disseminate information from her own experiences, as well as a place for her readers and followers to exchange their own ideas.

The Happiness Project has indeed become a movement of people learning to be happy by following Gretchen Rubin's example. However, isn't there something missing? What about unhappiness?

There's another famous quote about happiness from author Edith Wharton: "If only we'd stop trying to be happy, we'd have a pretty good time" [source: Wharton]. This raises an excellent question: In the pursuit of happiness, do we have a tendency to try too hard? Do we ignore the very real fact that some things in life are simply destined to make us unhappy?

Psychologists who accept unhappiness as a fact of life are concerned that this focus on happiness paints an incomplete picture of what it means to be a human being. Russ Harris, the author of "The Happiness Trap," points out that, despite modern culture's mechanisms of unhappiness and isolation (like overwork and those crises from the first page), we're obsessed with being happy. This obsession has led to several myths about happiness, like the ideas that "happiness is the natural state of human beings" and that "if you're not happy, you're defective" [source: Buhr].

These notions about the importance of happiness are not only harmful, say Harris and others; they also lead us away from truly understanding the concept. In the book "Against Happiness," author Eric G. Wilson argues that to "suffer melancholy is also to understand its polar opposite, joy" [source: Parker].

As it turns out, Happiness Project creator Gretchen Rubin agrees. She asserts that her experiment isn't a quest to eradicate unhappiness from her life. On the contrary, Rubin's found that The Happiness Project has made her more cognizant of the unhappiness she does feel. What's more, she now sees that gloom as a signal that attention must be paid to those parts of life that make us sad, angry or dissatisfied. "Feeling bad is a sign that it's time for action," she wrote in 2009 [source: Rubin]. Facing change can be a frightening experience, and humans seem to prefer immediate relative comfort over hard-fought happiness. Unhappiness pushes us into action, Rubin has concluded.

For more information on happiness and other related topics, visit the next page.