A Neurotic Hope

Title: “Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life”

Author: Gretchen Rubin

Rank: 60

Blurb: “One Sunday afternoon, as she unloaded the dishwasher, Gretchen Rubin felt hit by a wave of homesickness. Homesick — why? She was standing right in her own kitchen. She felt homesick, she realized, with love for home itself. ‘Of all the elements of a happy life,’ she thought, ‘my home is the most important.’ In a flash, she decided to undertake a new happiness project, and this time, to focus on home.”

Review: “I love scent, too, but the number of pages devoted to Rubin’s exploration of smell, including creating a Shrine to Scent, just seemed like an awful lot of attention spent trying to elevate the incredibly mundane.”

Customers Also Bought: “Expand-A-Drawer Spice Organizer”, “Panasonic NI-WL600 Cordless 360 Degree Multi-Directional Iron, Silver finish”, and “Mortality” by Christopher Hitchens.

Footnote: The cure for self-involvement is not more self-involvement.

Happier at Home [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

nojo
7:00 am • Sunday • September 9, 2012
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6 Comments

ManchuCandidate

10:17 am • Sunday • September 9, 2012

Jeez, that sounds like life as an unemployed bum, minus the anger, bitterness and urges to punch bankers and CEOs in the balls.

Dave H

1:11 pm • Sunday • September 9, 2012

Dear Gretchen, I suspect marrying Robert Rubin’s son and into his Goldman Sachs/Citigroup fortune probably helped make your life a bit happier too. Not that many Yale Law grads are worrying much about where their next meal will come from or where they’ll spend the night.

From the Amazon blurb about “The Happiness Project”, her first self-help book: “Among other things, she found that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that money can help buy happiness, when spent wisely; that outer order contributes to inner calm; and that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest difference.” Sounds like the perfect justification for the unhappy 0.1 percenters to use their money to avoid the boring and poor 99.9 percent.

nojo

1:27 pm • Sunday • September 9, 2012

@Dave H:

The Happiness Project:

1. Get a shitload of money.

2. Happiness!

The challenge is stretching that out to 300 pages.

Benedick

1:35 pm • Sunday • September 9, 2012

Somebody needs to be punched.

2:09 pm • Sunday • September 9, 2012

@Dave H:
Really? Gretch is a fucking smug asshole.