The Happiness Project

This popped up a few weeks ago in my little free library, and expecting that it fell into a similar category as my friend P.M. Forni's works, I thought I'd give it a quick read. Given the title, it certainly wasn't being marketed to me directly, but I suspect the writer lost the battle with the publisher for giving it a more sophisticated subtitle.

In particular, it comes out in the category of books fashioned from tying together ideas from a commonplace book(s). It's well written and covers a broad variety of ideas and research, which most are unlikely to be aware.

It's a bit more prescriptive and accessible to most in comparison to [b:Thinking, Fast and Slow|11468377|Thinking, Fast and Slow|Daniel Kahneman|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1317793965s/11468377.jpg|16402639], though I prefer the later for its depth. I was somewhat disappointed that her references were primarily from writers living after the 1400's while I initially expected to see more material from 400 BCE to 500AD, but one can obtain many of these from the aforementioned [a:P.M. Forni|148299|P.M. Forni|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png] references. I was disappointed that her one passing mention of eudaimonia was for its simple existence as a word rather than for its relation to the thesis of the overarching text.

Having read many of her references including having been a fan and proponent of Benjamin Franklin's system for several decades, I didn't learn too many ideas I wasn't previously aware of, though it did make for a relatively interesting biography, in great part because of a large overlap in my interests and the author's.

I ran across many poor reviews of the work which seemed to focus on the writer's privileged background and her choice to write on this particular topic. I find this generally disingenuous as I seriously doubt any of these critics would have leveled similar barbs at any of the better known philosophers from ancient Greece onward and every one of those authors also held positions of power, prestige, and/or wealth. The real difference between the groups of writers is that this is a meta-analysis and general recipe for a modern approach to happiness while prior efforts by the classical writers were generally of a more straightforward philosophical bent.

I wasn't a fan of the inserted comments from the author's blog as a general narrative construct, though they did serve to provide additional ideas outside of the direct sphere of the author's experience to give unimaginative readers ideas about how they could use the advice to structure their own program.

As very few are aware of and even fewer have tried to implement Franklin's system, I could easily recommend this to a variety of people, though given the title and the marketing viewpoint of the book, I'm not sure many would take the content as seriously as they ought. I would rarely read, much less recommend a "self-help" title, but though I wish the references to the science of happiness were more thorough here there is some great underlying scientific material, so I would recommend this to anyone who wants to contempalate how to live a happier life.