http://joys.net/6325/the-happiness-project-or-why-i-spent-a-year-trying-to-sing-in-the-morning-clean-my-closets-fight-right-read-aristotle-and-generally-have-more-fun-3/ Bringing Joys and Happiness Fri, 13 Mar 2020 09:48:42 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2 http://joys.net/6325/the-happiness-project-or-why-i-spent-a-year-trying-to-sing-in-the-morning-clean-my-closets-fight-right-read-aristotle-and-generally-have-more-fun-3/#comment-19743 mstar Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:12:40 +0000 http://joys.net/6325/the-happiness-project-or-why-i-spent-a-year-trying-to-sing-in-the-morning-clean-my-closets-fight-right-read-aristotle-and-generally-have-more-fun-3/#comment-19743 Research Author Before Deciding Whether to Read (Especially if You Lost Money in this Recession) Would you read a book called “The Happiness Project” if the cover depicted a bored, skinny, highly connected multimillionare leisurely staring out of her Manhattan mansion from her bed, rereading her favorite childhood books, fretting over her weight, gazing indifferently at her collection of bird memorabilia, and finding fault with her multimillionare husband while a nanny watched her children and a housecleaner tidied her home?No you would not, and Harper Collins knows this, which is why the cover features humble tenements and handwritten script and omits any detail that would make you think she’s not just an arty mom from Brooklyn looking to focus on the bright side of life.Who is she really? The way she tells it, she’s a lawyer who boldly gave up a law career to pursue her passion, writing. She neglects to mention that this was not much of a risk given that she is married to the son of Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup guy who personally helped ensure that derivatives stayed unregulated, netting millions for himself and billions of taxpayer bailout for his companies.Once you know this, the story is unpalatable. Rubin and Harper Collins know this, and go to great lengths to maintain the ruse that Rubin is an everywoman, writing that she hesitates to purchase a $2 pen, or a new blender, or new shirts. Yet how can she really write an honest happy project if she is not truthful?It is deceitful that she would say how tidying her home made her so much happier when you know that she has had a staff all along that can help her with just that. It seems odd that she encourages parents to remember “the days are long but the years are short” (an old saying she curiously takes credit for) when apparently she is spending much of her time reading and working on her pet project while a nanny looks after her baby. It seems unfair that she uses herself as an example of pursuing your dreams when you know she had years and years of leisure time to do anything or nothing she wanted, given her family’s economic situation, not to mention extraordinary connections that would have given her tremendous advantages over another aspiring writer.Maybe Rubin really did want to be a little happier, and that’s fair. She’s not a bad writer, and some of the ideas are good. (Minus flavoring salads with aspartame to stay slim.) But if she is going to sell her project to people who are probably genuinely suffering, quite likely at least a few of them in some part due to her own family’s actions, then she should be honest about who she is and what her circumstances are like.

]]> http://joys.net/6325/the-happiness-project-or-why-i-spent-a-year-trying-to-sing-in-the-morning-clean-my-closets-fight-right-read-aristotle-and-generally-have-more-fun-3/#comment-19742 J. Peplinski Fri, 25 Oct 2013 20:07:30 +0000 http://joys.net/6325/the-happiness-project-or-why-i-spent-a-year-trying-to-sing-in-the-morning-clean-my-closets-fight-right-read-aristotle-and-generally-have-more-fun-3/#comment-19742 No new insights here… I don’t want to belittle anyone else’s experience with this book, but for me these “happiness” ideas are concepts that have been rehashed over and over again in a zillion self-help books and articles.For example, her relationship epiphany seems to boil down to “you can’t change your partner, you can only change yourself.” Really? This fact somehow escaped her? Because it seems to me to be the point of pretty much every relationship article that has ever been written.In another essay, she wracks her brain to think of how on earth she might store all her children’s cards, photos, and other paper goods. What to do? Stacks aren’t working! Surely there must be some way of filing paper goods away in some kind of storage device…then it hits her: FILE BOXES! Are you freaking kidding me? How does someone get this far in life without having ever heard of organizing papers into files?There are other such oddities that make me wonder if this woman and I are living on the same planet, such as when she decides that collecting something might make her happy but can’t think of anything to collect. Is it me? Does everyone else begin collections by consciously deciding that they need one, then having to try and think up something to collect? Maybe it is me. I just thought that sort of thing tends to happen more organically.These are just examples, I don’t want to belabor the point by stating every single thing that made me roll my eyes throughout the book. There seemed to be something in every single chapter.She’s really not a bad writer and has a nice conversational style, which makes it regrettable that she uses nearly one quarter of the book to share anonymous comments that internet users have left on her blog. That was a bit off-putting for me. A few random insights from others sprinkled in here and there wouldn’t be so bad, but there are a LOT, which just seems like a lazy way to fill pages.If you are looking to start your own Happiness Project and need some ideas of where to begin, perhaps this book will give you some ideas. For me, I’ve read it all before – maybe I already did my own project and just didn’t realize it.

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