The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer’s Happiness and Economics, and I looked up for a moment to ponder the meaning of the sentence “It has been shown that pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction are separable constructs.” Along the same lines, I’d just read some research that showed that happiness and unhappiness (or, in more scientific terms, positive affect and negative affect) aren’t opposite sides of the same emotion—they’re distinct and rise and fall independently. Suddenly, as I thought about these ideas and about my own experience so far, everything slipped into place, and my happiness formula sprang into my mind with such a jolt that I felt as if the other subway riders must have been able to see a lightbulb appearing above my head. To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right. So simple, yet so profound. It looks like something you might read on the cover of a glossy magazine, but it had taken enormous effort to come up with a framework that ordered and distilled everything I’d learned. To be happy, I needed to generate more positive emotions, so that I increased the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy, and friendship in my life. That wasn’t hard to understand. I also needed to remove sources of bad feelings, so that I suffered less guilt, remorse, shame, anger, envy, boredom, and irritation. Also easy to understand. And apart from feeling more “good” and feeling less “bad,” I saw that I also needed...