The Happiness Project – Part I

How to quantify and gain awareness of your personal happiness

by Walter Oden

Prelude: 

I am generally a very happy person.  Yet, I have had some really low times.  We all face challenges in our lives. These challenges test our outlook on life.  Sometimes lows overshadow the highs.  I have been waiting to post on this topic for some time now.  I never seemed to find the right time.  I decided I would publish at a time I was REALLY HAPPY.  I also think I was nervous.  We are always wary when sharing some deep feelings.  Every holiday weekend is a time of reflection.  This weekend was no exception.  I thought about my dad often.  Yet, I really did have a wonderful weekend with my family.  Alas, happiness has motivated me to write about happiness.

Introduction

I originally wrote this article on New Year’s Day of 2012.  I actually shared it with a couple of friends at that time.   My dad was approaching the end of his life.   I was in a pretty dark state.  He had reached Advanced Parkinson’s Disease at that point.

I recently saw a poll result on general “Happiness”.  The report indicated that the average happiness of people was dropping dramatically.  One theory was that we are becoming too “technology” focused.  My theory is that “pressure” was taking over our lives.

Why Happiness is Important

Ask any parent what they want for their children.  Most will answer “I want them to be happy”.  What about your own life?  How do you want to breathe your last breath?  We have all seen the quotes describing what we will be thinking when we get older. They all have the same theme.  You will never say “I wish I spent one more day at the office”.  End game happiness is the goal. If we can learn how to do it, we can teach our children.  Then we will fulfill our mission.

New Year’s Resolutions

I make the same New Year’s resolution each year; Focus on happy.  This may sound like a cliché.  On the other hand, who hasn’t become a big cliché?  I am considered to be a “Tweener” by many.  I am not talking about the tennis shot between the legs.  A “Tweener” is term used around social circles to describe a state in your life.  If you have  people OLDER and YOUNGER relying on you for their well being, you are a TWEENER.  You also understand the special pressure that goes with this label.

My History

I have a beautiful loving family and my health.  I have a job I value.  Yet, the years of pressure from my dad’s health, debt, the economy and shear work load has added up.  In fact, it has robbed me of pleasure over the years.  It has robbed me of enjoying what is really important.  I have even occasionally described myself as unhappy.

Being weighed down by negatives is probably what is called “clinical depression”.  Do you see problems as bigger than they really are? This kind of negative stress has a big impact.  It affects you, your family and everyone around you.

My dad’s illness first became prevalent about seven years ago.  The first “hit” was when he lost everything he owned.  That became the least of our issues.  We were fighting so hard for his well being.  We wanted any glimpse of hope.   He lost his fight during January of 2013.  During his decline, I felt helpless most of the time.  Stress + Helplessness + Money Woes + Responsibility and you get one giant ball of unhappy.

Yet, I am going to hypothesize a strange concept; Unhappiness is a mirage.

Why do the Project?

I would try to go see my dad in the nursing home for long visits about once per week.  On other days I would pop in and out.  I was always guilty I couldn’t be there more.  He told me on New Year’s 2012 how “unhappy” he was.   During our visits it was very hard to focus on any positives.  My dad had not come to terms with his plight.  He was also very aware of what is coming.  My dad had dementia that kept getting worse.  He was very scared.  If I tried to bring up the past, he resisted it.  This was his defense mechanism.  It was almost like if he remembered the past, he got more depressed.  He wished it was the past and it wasn’t.

A Call to Action

And now for another cliché.  How do we live in the “now”?  Do you have a habit of waiting for things to happen to you?.  Are you always looking for that change that will make you truly happy?  Could more money or a better house make you happy?  Maybe, but not necessarily.

Yet, if we don’t get to happy right now, we’ll miss it.  That is because happy isn’t a moment in time.  It is time itself.  Having “time” is what happy is.  My dad was out of time.  He didn’t have much happy left.  He missed the opportunity to embrace his time when he was happiest.

I don’t want to get to the end of my life and say “I guess what I used to have was happy”.  I missed it.  I don’t want to ignore what is happy.

The Concept

I was trying to conceptualize this plight in the last couple of years.  I wondered if happiness was simply a state of mind.  I wondered if it was a state of awareness.  Could I be happy and not see it?  It reminds me of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  You go through life and can’t realize how lucky you are to be you.

By the way, I included the imbedded link above to also answer a favorite trivia item of mine.  Ever wonder how the characters Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street were developed?

So I said to myself “I wonder if we can define happiness in something that is NOT SUBJECTIVE.  How could we create a definition of “Happiness” in terms of something that is totally OBJECTIVE.  Could I take a math approach to happiness?  How about an accounting approach to happiness?  Could I tally things and record them on a balance sheet?  Could I create the financial statements of life?

The project

I am about to show the reader why I quit being a CPA.  I have to explain some basic accounting to the reader.  It will take you about 3 seconds to pass out with boredom.  Please trudge through it, it matters.

Basic financial statements include a Balance Sheet and Income Statement.  The Balance Sheet lists all your Assets, Liabilities and Owner’s Equity (Sometimes called Retained Earnings).

The Income Statement (Sometimes called the P&L) is a picture of income and expenses during a given time period.  That period is usually a calendar year.

This concept has not changed in accounting in a hundred years.  Even Ebenezer Scrooge understood this.  Although, his accounting methodologies included slave labor that took food out of the mouth of Tiny Tim.

If you are still awake, you may be asking why do we need to know this material?  The answer is what I call the “Happiness Project”

Getting Started – Your Balance Sheet

We need to build financial statements to your life.  We will begin with a Balance Sheet. Start by listing all of your assets.  These are not just things you OWN!  These are things that are positive to your life.  Some examples include:

1) A wife that loves me

2) Three very different kids that love their dad.

3) Own a home

4) A job I like

Then you need to list your liabilities.  These are the things that are potentially negatives.

1) Debt

2) House has huge flaws that can only be fixed with lots of money

3) Job requires long hours that take away from my family

4) Father in nursing home with incurable disease.

5) Wavering belief in higher power/purpose

Finally, you need to list what positives or negative you NET after your years.  That is the statement of retained earnings

1) Fairly youthful looking from years on tennis courts

2) Home is worth more than I owe from years of paying mortgage

Your Current Year – The Income Statement

Now we need to build an Income Statement.  This will require daily recording of Income (Things that make you happy) and Expenses (Things that block your happiness).  You need to religiously record this data every day for 30 days.  Record everything that made you happy, especially the simple stuff.

Monday

Income

1) Kids came running to door yelling “daddy!” and attacked me .  They squeezed me dragged me inside.

2) Had more than (3)  beers in the fridge

3) Great dinner waiting on stove top

Expense

1) Got into a conflict with co- worker today

2) Cash flow went negative today

3) Leak in pipe in basement appeared today

Working list and results

It is impossible to create all these statements in one sitting.  Our subconscious does an incredible job blocking things out.  You may be adding to your balance sheet as you develop your income statement. That is totally fine.

Analysis of your statements

You can have a good year or bad year (income statement).  The key is to focus on the income.  Why?

This is YOUR HAPPINESS PROJECT summarized!

Take all the INCOME items you listed for 30 days.  Put them on a single sheet. That list is your roadmap to happiness. It’s kind of like how you value a business.  Sometimes, you just want to know how much revenue the business earns each year.

Happiness is a cumulative conglomeration of happy moments all rolled up into a single ball.

This project forces you to be aware of your happy moments.  Happiness does not guarantee a life devoid of unhappiness or negatives.  In fact, the key to this project is being able to accept negatives and SEPARATE them from the HAPPY.  Focusing on the happy, is merely a matter of getting organized.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

This movie starred Jim Carrey,  Kate Winslet & Kirsten Dunst.  It got mixed reviews.  I thought it was brilliant.  The premise was that we had invented a way of erasing memories.  In fact, you could erase any BAD memories and eliminate your sadness.  The movie created a hypothesis through its story.  A person’s happiness is eternally linked to all moments in your life.  Eliminate the unhappy and you risk eliminating the happy.

Life experience, much like our income statement, includes both Happy and Unhappy moments. Our project allows you to focus on the happy without ever “erasing” the lessons learned from the unhappy.

Conclusions & Part II

This project will NOT add happiness to your life.  This project will not eliminate sadness or disappointment.  The bigger plan is to make you aware of what you already have.  That happiness is a state of mind.  It is a state of awareness.  We can either choose to be happy or not be happy.  I am choosing happy.  We will explore methods for improving your financial statements of life in PART II.

My Dad in 1968

Copyright Walter Oden & “I Have an Idea” –  January 2012 – All rights reserved.  Please review the global copyright notice on the sidebar.