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Enjoy Your Inexplicable Passions

Cultivate your passions, they can be a huge engine of joy in your life. Do you have so many passions that you could drop one without losing an important source of happiness?
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The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin shares that to counteract her impulse to work all the time she pushes herself to follow resolutions like: force herself to wander, take time for projects, read at whim, and take notes without a purpose. “And my most important resolution, of course, is to Be Gretchen.” 

What’s the Big Idea?

Another key thing that Rubin does is to allow herself to follow a new passion as far as she wants. And sometimes she’s lucky enough to have turned these passions into her work. “When I became obsessed with Winston Churchill, I wrote a book about Churchill. What a joy it was to write that book! My preoccupation with St. Therese ended up playing an important role in The Happiness Project. …I no longer worry about whether they’ll be useful in that way, or not. I just let myself go. That’s because, a few years ago, it finally dawned on that I didn’t have so many passions that I could drop one without losing an important source of happiness.”
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Happy New Year
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
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