Something Making Us (More) Happier

• Elizabeth: She’s stressed (and excited) about hosting Christmas Eve for her extended family, so she’s been wrapping gifts, because it feels good to get a task done. Plus using the Corgi wrapping paper makes her happier.
• Gretchen: It makes me happy to see Elizabeth having so much fun with the whole Corgi theme! Plus we all now have two additional years to get our Real ID.

You can find lots of gift ideas in the Happiness Project shop! But order by December 14; after that date, expedited shipping won’t arrive in time for December 25.

Happier in Action

A listener wrote to tell us about how she’d successfully invoked our tip for finding lost objects: look more closely in the place where you think the item should be.

Spotlight on a Tool

Many people start reading The Happiness Project or Better Than Before as they gear up for the new year. If I do say so myself, those books are full of ideas for how to become happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative.

Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

Elizabeth and I discuss: Pickleball!

We mention Matthew Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (Amazon, Bookshop).

I quote from the Roman philosopher Cicero, who wrote that Xerxes the Great “offered a prize for the man who could invent a new pleasure.”

Quotation

I can recall in my childhood the continuous excitement of long days in which nothing happened; and an indescribable sense of fullness in large and empty rooms. And with whatever I retain of childishness…I still feel a very strong and positive pleasure in being stranded in queer quiet places, in neglected corners where nothing happens and anything may happen; in unfashionable hotels, in empty waiting-rooms, or in watering-places out of the season. It seems as if we needed such places, and sufficient solitude in them, to let certain nameless suggestions soak into us and make a richer soil of the unconscious.
– G. K. Chesterton, “On the Thrills of Boredom”