The How of Happiness

Three of you asked for my thoughts on The How of Happiness. This is a straightforward book by an actual psychology researcher. Its premise is that happiness comes about 50% from your genetic set point, 10% from your life circumstances and 40% from your behavior and conscious thought patterns. Then it encourages you to take that 40% and make it happen. (If 40% sounds depressingly low to you, why? If it's the difference between 20% happy and 60% happy, that's dramatically life-changing.)

The author also carefully makes the case that being happier is not just for feeling good, but is worth pursuing for wider reasons: being happier boosts your immune system, your energy levels, and your engagement with work and other people. One person being happier is a benefit to that person's "partners, families, communities and even society at large".

The most valuable 2.5 pages of this book comprise the "Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic", a little test that's meant to tell you which of the 12 happiness strategies in the book will likely be a good fit for you. (The test's a bit wonky since you wind up subtracting an average of two numbers from an average of three numbers, but whatever.) The book recommends you pick the four with the highest scores, and then skip directly to the chapters describing those. Frankly, I wish I'd followed that advice. And then I wish that there had also been the advice to SKIP chapters whose fit scores were actually negative, since they are lousy fits and the reader might just be irritated reading them. Personally, I read the whole book before coming back and taking the test.

My top four: Taking care of my body, doing activities that truly engage me, avoiding overthinking & social comparison, developing strategies for coping. Also high-scoring was savoring life's joys.

In the middle: expressing gratitude, practicing acts of kindness, learning to forgive.

My negative scores: practicing religion and spirituality, cultivating optimism, nurturing relationships, committing to goals (actually this one scored zero -- it's high in both "intrinsic" and "guilt"-type motivators for me and so it scored zero total).

There was only one activity per category to rate, and a couple of them were oddly phrased, so this isn't 100% accurate for me. It's the start of what annoyed me about the book: very weird categorization. I already listed the twelve categories; all are presented fairly equally in terms of their potential importance, with each reader being encouraged to work on at least three or four of them. In each chapter she presents (in not-too-much detail) the outcomes of various studies related to the activity. A few of these were quite interesting -- for example, when expressing gratitude, most people showed the biggest boost from listing things they were grateful for every week instead of every day. Doing it every day apparently just becomes a chore, for most. The author also encourages self-experimentation to see which strategies should be pursued when... I know I usually post to 3goodthings or similar when I've had a crap day, and this apparently is pretty valid; doing it irregularly and when I really need the boost is a recognized strategy.

But back to complaining about categorization. The "taking care of your body" chapter covers "engaging in physical activity, meditating, laughing and smiling." Not the way I would have broken that one down at all. The optimism chapter focuses rather a lot on journaling about one's ideal "best possible self" future, which seems a little wacko to me, although the text also supports a more levelheaded "I can get through the day" kind of optimism.

The "practicing religion and spirituality" chapter, after annoying me as usual with discussions of how much happier religion and faith make people, randomly included a great one-page aside on "seeking meaning and purpose".... something that can be done entirely without religion! Gah! This a seriously insightful little section, talking about pursuing goals that are harmonious instead of conflicting, and feeling like one has a coherent life story, and being creative. Yes, being creative! Why was that buried deep in the bowels of "practicing religion", I'd like to know.

Overall, reading this book was pretty nice, but then it was on my favorite topic -- I'll read nearly anything on the subject of happiness research. I'm still flummoxed by its organization, and surprised at how many suggested activities were primarily mental ones (although I accept these may have been studied most often). If I were recommending a list of books to read about happiness, I'd recommend the following before this one:

• Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
• Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

I tend toward forgiveness on self-help books, though. If there's even one good idea that gets incorporated into my life, or one insight I can remember, then I consider it worth reading the book. Reading doesn't take long, and all the nitpicks are things I'll forget anyway.

More on minimalism... and snow shovels

I've continued to read about minimalism online and a lot of it is resonating with me, despite the fact that I haven't agreed 100% with any minimalist blogger I've run across so far. Someone asked me yesterday what I like about it. I rattled off a few things that were mostly the benefits of not having a lot of physical stuff -- his response was "what a strange hodge-podge of ideas."

Fair enough. But my claim is that the ownership of objects is a strange hodge-podge to begin with.

An item you own can have simple utility. It may have material value. It takes up physical space. It may represent money that you spent, effort that you expended to acquire it. It may be a signaling device, telling visitors to your home what you are like. It may represent a memory. It might stand in your mind for an idea or a relationship. It is something you have to store. It is something you have to move sometimes. It is something you may have to maintain -- and this can be negligible for a book, or costly and complicated for a car. It is something you own but also have a responsibility to. It might represent a future dream or goal (pants that don't fit anymore, anyone?), or a past self (prom dress that doesn't fit anymore?). It is something that can sit around blocking your view of other items (like that tape measure you're looking for). Whatever -- my only point is that thing-ownership is not terribly simple, and it does have physical, time-management, rational, and emotional aspects to it. That's why it makes sense that the opposite of thing-ownership also has effects in all those areas.

What I'm aiming for, and meaning by "minimalism" right now for me, is something like:

• I want to own only things that I really love.
• Or, to say it another way, I want to only own things that are useful or inspiring.
• In addition, I mostly only want as many of any one thing as I need -- for another clothes example, no need for five pairs of black pants if I only wear my favorite two pairs in any given week. (A silly example since I don't even tend to wear my one pair of black pants, but hey.)
• In addition, I want calm, pleasing environments that are not cluttered.
• Lastly, I want to be living in the present as much as possible for a future-oriented person, and after all this reading, I think the state of my possessions can help with that. Seeing things all the time that hold memories but don't apply to my current life will only keep me stuck mentally in the past, which for the most part is my least favorite place ever.

The same friend as above, who I'll call rifmeister for the sake of argument, then asked: What about my snow shovel? Are my choices to either love my snow shovel, or buy a new shovel every time it snows?

First, I don't think it's crazy to love a snow shovel. I think it would be great to have one really nice snow shovel, maybe a cool color with one of those bendy ergonomic handles. Or you could just keep a random snow shovel around, file it under "utility" and not worry about it. But, at this point, I would not want a pile of six crappy snow-shovels leaning messily on my house in various states of disrepair. That wouldn't be minimalist, and no one shovel would be terribly useful; every time I shoveled I'd be trying to choose the least of six possible evils, and it would probably make me grouchy. Much better to have the single, very useful, possibly loveable shovel.

I'm not sure I buy into "minimalism as a philosophy". I think it's primarily an aesthetic. I'm pursuing it right now because I'm having fun doing so, not because I think it's "right" and everything else is wrong, and that's actually enough for me. :) I'm also only dealing with my own stuff, since I'm definitely in a household where one person is more minimalist than the other, and that's totally fine with me. We're both busy. I just want to see how far I can go in this direction, for fun.