Being Happy

Yahoo! News ran an interesting piece from LiveScience.com on the top five things that people can do to improve their level of happiness. Conspicuously absent among the list, however, was any exhortation to find the perfect layout for one’s blog. Naturally, this hasn’t kept your humble layout addict from trying, yet again, to find just the right one.

The difference, this time, is that I just might have found it.

The changing scenery around these parts have earned my indecision the title of ‘running joke’ by some loyal readers. The assessment is probably more apt than I care to admit. I am unaware of any layout that has lasted more than six months since I started the blog back in waning hours of 2004. Consider your own life going on the past ten years, and you get a better appreciation for my changing habits. But the layout you see before you, after many hours of research, presents the minimalist aspirations of my former post on Zen blogging, while adding a sleek, easy-to-read presentation with even more bells and whistles than complex looking layout up most of last week. This one just might have staying power…

Regardless, I like to think that I’m living point five of the LiveScience article. Each time I change the layout around here, it’s a small act of kindness for you the reader. The five tips by LiveScience were all pretty interesting in isolation. It reminds me of the Valentine’s Day post discussing happiness by Brazencarrerist. I would add another link, but there’s just something about quoting myself twice in the same post that makes me uneasy. Of course, if you crack open the textbook of any professor, you’re bound to find one or two citations to the author’s earlier works. To the extent that they quote themselves, it’s nice to know that megalomania extends outside the realm of blogging.

Anyway, about those five bits of advice. They are all fairly typical really:

1. Be grateful.
2. Be optimistic.
3. Count your blessings.
4. Use your strengths.
5. Commit acts of kindness

[Link]

While the advice isn’t bad, it also isn’t very practical. The article went to great pains to outline perfectly good reasons for its recommendations, but it failed miserably to offer anything in the way of advice to those who are chronically challenged at doing any of the above. Take yours truly, for example.

Showing gratitude is something I’ve never been terribly good at. Ask my wife. And while I appreciate the heck out of people, most of them would never know it. It just isn’t in my DNA to be effusively grateful. The habit probably stems from some repressed memory of childhood. I’m pretty sure it involves a snake – but I digress. Anyway, I try to supplement my lack of gratefulness with acts of kindness. According to the calculus, this should be a slam-dunk gain in net happiness under article 5. Right? Except it isn’t because I worry that my kindness will not be interpreted as a substitute for gratitude by the beneficiary of my appreciation. Thus, stress creeps in and sucks up all the good energy.

As for optimism, well lets just say I’ve always been much more comfortable at the pessimism end of the scale. It’s not that I think good things are categorically barred from happening to me. It’s just that I think it’s much more likely that something bad will happen than something good – and this is usually about right.

On the other hand, I am pretty good at counting my blessings. I have the privilege of sitting down nearly every day and opining to whomever cares to read. I have a tremendous wife, a terrific family back in Oklahoma, and I have absolutely first-rate friends. If I were out of law school, one might say I was a lucky guy.

And so, like most articles from LiveScience, take the suggestions above with more than a grain of salt. The advice isn’t bad, and it may actually help. But, of course, you may be too far gone already if you frequent this blog. In which case, remember: a little pessimism goes a long way.