The Happiness Manifesto

Buddy The Dog cruising Glacier National Park.

I've been checking out Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project and The Happiness Project Toolbox. An interesting set of tools to move you toward good times: a group resolution kit, a list of personal commandments you can pick and choose for yourself, and my favorite -  "Adult Education." Reminders of what you've already learned from life - so that you don't repeat your mistakes.  I'll have to add mine: "Not everyone at work is on your side."

Here is the Manifesto Rubin created:

A Happiness Manifesto

• To be happy, you need to consider feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
• One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy; One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.
• The days are long, but the years are short.
• You're not happy unless you think you're happy.
• Your body matters.
• Happiness is other people.
• Think about yourself so you can forget yourself.
• "It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light."—G. K. Chesterton
• What's fun for other people may not be fun for you, and vice versa.
• Best is good, better is best.
• Outer order contributes to inner calm.
• Happiness comes not from having more, not from having less, but from wanting what you have.
• You can choose what you do, but you can't choose what you like to do.
• "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy." —Robert Louis Stevenson
• You manage what you measure.

I agree that your body matters. It's important to balance the need to care for it with the need to enjoy life. I think it can also be helpful to act the way you feel (not on this list). Not as a performance, but as a way to get out of the groove of just being...well...bummed.

What do you think is missing from this list? What's relevant? Are any of these items just complete crap - in your opinion?

Comments

[Sue]

All very interesting. The "outer order/inner calm" one makes sense. However, I am usually pretty calm but I am a slob, or at least a very bad housekeeper. I also know people who are major neat freaks but they certainly do not seem to have inner calm. Sometimes a good "10-minute tidy" can make everything seem better. However, sometimes all the cleaning in the world isn't going to solve the real issue. Or at least that's what I say to make myself feel better.

[teent]

That's a good Buddy photo.