Happy Halloween! This year, I’m traveling, and I’m sad that I’ll miss my tradition of walking around my neighborhood with two friends, to look at all the costumes and bonkers decorations. New York City Halloween is terrific. I’ve been having fun with a list that the Metropolitan Museum created, of its “20 Scariest Artworks.” I love to test my knowledge of the Met, and I was very familiar with all but three of these works. However, two works that I’d propose didn’t make the list. First, I find the unfinished face on this marble sarcophagus lid (Roman, AD 220) very unsettling. (“While the man’s head is carefully portrayed, his wife’s head has been left unfinished, suggesting that he predeceased her, and no one added her portrait after she died.”) Second, of all the objects in the museum, I think that this Kafigeledjo (“he who speaks the truth”) (Senufo artist, 19th-mid-20th century) has the most uncanny power. I visit it almost every time I go to the Met. “A hybrid creation that lies outside the realm of anything recognizable in nature, this oracle figure deliberately provokes anxiety through its shrouded anonymity and the entrapment it suggests.” The fact that the figure’s proportions suggest a toddler dragging a toy make it all the more eerie.
Onward,
5 Things Making Me Happy
I love a trend, and it turns out that this year, people are buying more non-chocolate Halloween candy. Gummy treats are on the rise.
In Better Than Before, my book about habit change, I explore the 21 strategies we can use to make or break our habits. One of the most powerful and universal strategies is the Strategy of Inconvenience: If you want to discourage yourself from a habit, make it taxing, unpleasant, annoying. So I can see that a cumbersome six-pound phone case might really help people disengage from their smartphones.
Like everyone, I was horrified by the devastation of the Los Angeles fires, and I paid particular attention because my sister Elizabeth (my co-host on the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast) had to evacuate for a week—thankfully, her house was fine. So I was very intrigued to learn about a developing technology that uses sound—with a frequency below the range audible to humans—to fight fires. The idea is that a home-based system would turn on whenever sensors detected a flame.
Speaking of fighting fires, this weekend, the United States will switch from daylight saving time to standard time (except Hawaii, Arizona, and the US territories, which keep standard time year round). Safety agencies recommend using the time change as a reminder to put fresh batteries in your smoke detectors.
Trick or treat! For the next 24 hours, you can save 30% on productivity tools from the Happiness Project with the code YOUCAN.
This Halloween, Treat Your Dog to the Healthiest, Vet-Crafted Meals They’ve Ever Had
No tricks here: Vet-founded Sundays was created to make the best dog food in the world. Air-dried in a human-grade kitchen, it’s clean, filler-free, and invests 50x more in ingredients than other brands—no mess, no prep, real food your dog will love.
This week on Happier with Gretchen Rubin
PODCAST EPISODE: 558
Have “One Big Thing” Holding You Back? Listeners Weigh In. Plus the Value of Making Space.
INTERVIEW
Nicholas Thompson
Nicholas Thompson is a journalist, distance-runner, and current CEO of The Atlantic. His new memoir, The Running Ground—a meditation on aging, fathers and sons, and of course, running—is available now.
Q: Can you suggest something we might try to help ourselves to become happier, healthier, more productive, or more creative?
Yes! Go for a run. But when you do it, don’t listen to music, don’t wear your watch, and don’t think about how fast you are going. Just, one-by-one, try to focus on only one of your senses. Listen to everything you can hear. Smell everything you can smell. Focus on all the different colors you can see.
Q: Do you have a Secret of Adulthood? A lesson you’ve learned from life the hard way; something you’d tell your younger self?
When things go badly, stop, reset, and then just do the next thing well. It can feel like the world is moving too slowly and that everything is too hard. But if you do one thing right, it makes it easier to do the next thing right. You repeat the process enough, and you have a good shot at getting up whatever mountain you are trying to climb.
Q: What simple habit boosts your happiness or energy?
Looking at my to-do list. Identifying the hardest thing that I least want to do, setting a timer, and then spending 15 minutes doing it.
Q: Is there a particular motto that you’ve found very helpful?
“Never take on mice, when you can take on a tiger. The mice have a right to chew you to death. The tiger will fight and you’ll win.” My father said this to me once when I was 21 after I had failed something I desperately wanted. It’s not entirely true. Tigers do have big teeth. But there’s a beautiful insight in it, and I’ve always loved it as an expression of parental love and confidence.
Q: Has a book ever changed your life? If so, which one and why?
This isn’t quite fair, but writing my last book The Hawk and the Dove about the relationship between George Kennan and Paul Nitze allowed me to spend years studying two of the most impressive men of the past century. It was an intellectual challenge to write the book, but it was also a way to learn the habits and minds of two role models.
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