The Happiness Project

Author: Gretchen Rubin

Rating: ⭐ 2/5

Date Read: 2014/01/04

Pages: 301

The Happiness Project is a perfectly middling book about being happier through monthly projects. Each month, author Gretchen Rubin focuses on happiness by doing things like decluttering and not nagging her husband. Is this book worthy? Nope; it’s really just blog worthy. It’s not uninteresting, except that everything could be covered in about 5,000 words. Having it all unnecessarily written out into around 300 pages made it all seem annoyingly repetitive. By the sixth month of rich white people resolutions, getting through each practically-identical chapter felt like an almost Sisyphian task.

(Sidenote: Rubin reprints blog comments in pretty much every chapter, with no commentary or attribution. This really irked me. If I wanted to read the internet, I wouldn’t be reading a book.)

Speaking of rich white people problems: Rubin is rich and white. This mostly didn’t bother me, except for the parts where Rubin talked about “ordinary people” increasing their happiness. Being wealthy isn’t particularly ordinary, after all. And there was the money chapter, where Rubin concludes (against most empirical evidence) that money buys happiness. Great.

Any book that deals with peoples’ problems is going to be highly personalized. Rubin expends a lot of effort trying to nag and yell less. I sure have a lot of flaws, but not those ones, so I had a hard time caring about how hard it was for her to hold her tongue when someone bought the wrong lightbulbs.

Also, if you’re looking for a way to keep those health-related resolutions, look elsewhere. There’s only a teeny, tiny bit in here about food, which I found strange (my life mostly centers around food, so that would be a large part of any happiness project I did). At one point, Rubin talks about giving up “fake food,” but then backpedals and talks about how much she likes Diet Coke (Diet Coke features all too often in this book). At one point, Rubin recounts a meal with a friend, a salad with no dressing sprinkled with artificial sweetener, which sounds unhealthy (where’s the protein? where’s the fat?) and disgusting.

Overall verdict: skip it or skim it, unless you’re really into this sort of book.