I wanted to like The Happiness Project

Has anyone read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin?

Is it just me, or is this book totally barf-worthy?

She talks about "eating healthy" with her friend on the "no fake food" resolution & then they put artificial sweetener on their SALAD (instead of dressing... fewer calories! Yippee!)

This is the nonsense that gives Americans in general & positive psychology in particular a bad name.

GIVE ME OLIVE OIL!

Did we really claw our way to the top of the food chain to eat artificial sweetener on our salad?

I wanted to like The Happiness Project. Really I did.

The premise is right up my alley: A woman--a wife and a mother no less--sets out to make herself happier. And she does so without apology. Radical. Gretchen's character, with all her chart-making anxiety, is endearing. She's well-read and well-educated. Maybe that's why it's all the more maddening to watch her poison her salad and make resolutions like "don't eat hours' d'vours" and "make three new friends" and "unclutter your closets."

Am I really being invited to diet and make fake friends and do housework for happiness?

My daughter doesn't usually go in for feminist conspiracy theories, but she took one look at the book and said, quite seriously, "Maybe she was hired by the government. Just like Taylor Swift. Reverting back to the 50s-housewife kitchen-sink diaries so we won't pay attention to the war and the economy."

I appreciated my daughter's immediate clarity. Here I'd sat with the book for hours, allowing it to make me feel like a loser. I don't consider myself poor, but suddenly I was thinking, Wow, if I can't afford a personal trainer, a professional photographer for the kids, and an organic salad (with saccharine) at a New York deli, how will I ever be happy??

Positive psychologist Martin Seligman has said, "when nations are wealthy and not in civil turmoil and not at war, they start asking what makes like worth living, and that's what positive psychology is about."

But I reject the idea that positive psychology can only be a psychology of privilege.

Rich people have every right to their feelings, sure, but materialism isn't what ultimately makes people happy--materialism is what's killing the planet.

In the introduction to The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin makes a point to underline how "fortunate" she is--with her tall, dark, handsome, and well-employed husband and their healthy children. But she also states, as so many writers on happiness do, that she can't really define happiness. "I'll know it when I see it," they say.

Happiness is hard to define--it's a vast human emotion--but if we're going to consider something deeply--if we're going to write a whole book about it--I think we can venture at least a working definition.

Canadian positive psychologist Paul T.P. Wong defines happiness as “the capacity to rejoice in the midst of suffering.” I like that definition. Happiness isn’t the absence of suffering. Happiness doesn’t have to be about privilege or denial.

“Your definition of happiness will depend upon who you are--” Masura Emoto writes in The Hidden Messages in Water, “but do you have a sense of peace in your heart, a feeling of security about your future, and a feeling of anticipation when you wake up in the morning? If we can call this happiness, then would you say that at this moment you are happy?”

Clearly happiness is hard to muster when we have real survival anxiety, but if happiness requires a personal trainer and an "over buying" problem as we read about in The Happiness Project--Well, I don't know.

But next time I get $10, I'm spending it on olive oil--& I'm sharing it with someone who'll appreciate a little fat.