Happiness and Justice?
The Happiness Project
by Gretchen Rubin
Harper, 2009
The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin's latest, is a smash bestseller. A yearlong look at ways to boost contentment, the book is a first-person account of how to keep resolutions and change one’s life without changing it. Rubin espouses simple maxims (“let it go”), shares her “Secrets of Adulthood” (“do good, feel good”) and exhorts readers to get more sleep, have more fun and clean their closets.
Before she turned her attention to happiness and closets, Rubin was a law student at Yale (where she edited the Yale Law Journal) and was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
We talked with Rubin about happiness and justice and how lawyers can be happier.
Just Books: Let's start with Benjamin Franklin. You write that The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, a book about self realization and the struggle for moral perfection, was a big influence. Aside from his obsessive note-taking and chart-making, did Franklin influence the Happiness Project?
Gretchen Rubin: He was very cheerful and practical. Really he is the patron saint of anybody who wants to do a happiness project. He went about it very systematically. He failed frequently, but says he ended up better off than if he hadn’t tried. He was also enormously productive. So he was a great example of somebody who was a very successful person who did something like that. He had this group that met to talk about ideas and to work on happiness-project things. He did this in between founding public libraries and inventing bifocals.
Samuel Johnson was also the patron saint of happiness projects, because he made and broke the same resolutions for decades. He was constantly resolving to get up early. And he never did. He wrote the English dictionary, so he can cut himself some slack. And he had this amazing attitude about his own human nature and human nature generally. So I was really influenced by him.
And St. Thérèse, who is a very different kind of person. Her focus is on the ordinary day and the ordinary life; and this idea that you can find heroic virtue without leaving your house. This was something that I thought about a lot, which was how to change your life without changing your life. Those are the three people that were most influential to me.
JB: For his project, Benjamin Franklin identified 13 virtues to cultivate, one of which was "justice." Do you see a link between happiness and justice?
GR: Certainly. When you think about happiness, you think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right in an atmosphere of growth. Feeling good is what makes you interested and excited and joyful. And you want to have less of what makes you feel bad, angry, resentful, bored.
This third idea of feeling right is on a much different plane. This is the degree to which your life reflects your values and the ideas of justice that you think are important. It is also the degree to which your society reflects your values, which is something that American society thinks about constantly.
Some people want to make this their life's work. They feel morally compelled to work on things like exoneration. And justice is really important to that. For other people, they’re not wholly committed in that way, but in different ways.
JB: Do you find it hard to be happy when there is so much injustice in the world?
GR: Well, this is a very interesting question. Some hold that it is not morally appropriate for people to want to be happy, because in a world full of suffering, that is not a morally just response. Some people think that if you value something like justice, you shouldn’t want to be happy. In fact, you should go around raging all the time. And so people shouldn’t try to be happier, and if they do, they are selfish and smug and complacent.
But if you think about the people you know, and research shows this, happy people are more interested in social problems, more interested in the problems of other people. They’re more altruistic; they give away more money; they get more involved; and they make better leaders when they do get involved.
There is an idea that happy people can be annoying and that people are constantly rolling their eyes. But actually in real life, people prefer to be around happy people. They are more persuasive; and they are seen as having more moral fiber. And when people are happy, they have the emotional wherewithal to reach out and think about the problems of the world. And people who are less happy tend to be more defensive, more isolated, more preoccupied with their personal problems.
So if you are worried about justice, it is not incongruous to also want to be happy. Because you are probably going to be more effective making the changes you want to see, if you are happier yourself.
JB: Knowing what it’s like to be a lawyer, do you have any tips on how lawyers might best be happy?
GR: I think the problem is that too many people go into the legal profession. If everybody went into sound engineering school, as went to law school, then you would say why are there all these unhappy sound engineers. Some people who go to sound engineering school belong there. And other people are there for their own random reasons and so it’s not a great fit. It’s the same thing with law. So if it’s not a good fit, then it is a big struggle.
It is about balance and finding boundaries with your work, which is a huge problem for lawyers. And it’s about making time for fun, which is really hard for somebody who is working really, really hard. And getting enough sleep.
Gretchen Rubin blogs at The Happiness Project.
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