Read The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections for Free Online

than on how we experience them. Seligman stresses that the spin our memories put on things is more important than how we feel in the moment. By contrast other leading positive psychologists, such as Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, emphasize the importance of the “experiencing self” as a measure of happiness more than the “remembering self.” Kahneman says it’s the moment, the actual experience, that matters. Clearly, researchers are grappling with the question of whether the memory of an event is more important to our happiness than the actual experience of the event.
    I know that I look back at my life and see it through rose-colored goggles: I’m a sentimental optimist. If I had fun skiing once, I assume I’ll have fun skiing again. Seligman believes this makes sense, since happiness isn’t how you feel in the moment, it’s comprised of three essential components over a lifetime of experiences: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.
    I would add that in my years of editing well-being features of, about, and for women, I’ve found that most of us want to be happy. From the point of view of my remembering cold ski weekends, there may have been many miserable moments on the mountain, but in my mind, the lines are shorter, the hot chocolate warmer and creamier, and the frigid wind just a gentle breeze. Despite the long trudge through the parking lot while schlepping little skis, I tell myself it was fun. I want to see the glass as half full. And I want to be rewarded for my natural optimism. So long as I’m pursuing happiness, I like to tell myself I’m on the right track.
    Here is the truth about our memory: Looking back, the little niggling annoyances fade away, and we believe we were happy. So if we ask ourselves if we’re happy right now, we’d find reasons to downgrade the present from, say, a great day to an only okay day. Ask ourselves in the future to look back at the moment we are living presently and we’d say we were happy then (meaning now) and realize it was actually pretty great. The key is to have that perspective as we live our lives.
    Think ahead, two weeks, two months, two years, any time frame, and say to yourself a sentence that characterizes what is happening in your life right now, and how you feel about it. Mine would be something like this: “Those were good times! Writing that book, editing Self magazine, running triathlons, enjoying my happy marriage, raising two bright teenaged kids, all of it!” The day-to-day stresses, like the bills, the squabbles over homework to be done, my own deadlines at the office, the few pounds that come and go, and all the rest, would just fade to the background and not matter. So why can’t we feel that way right now , when the stresses are front and center in our minds?
    Like editing images for the family album, your job is to try to realize that despite the snapshots that need omitting you are living a happy life. If you find a way to understand that everything that isn’t bad is good, you can understand this: You are in fact happier than you think you are this moment .
    So if your memory wants you to remember the now as a happy moment, why fight it? The more relevant question is: How do we help it along?
    No One Can Make You Happy.
Well, Almost No One…
    In Bhutan, the king proclaimed that he wanted the people of his country to think not about the Gross Domestic Product but about the “Gross National Happiness” in a measurable way. He made it an official mandate to produce happiness.
    By this measure, one reason we westerners have gone awry is that we’ve made the number one pursuit the GDP, prioritizing all things material. The GNH is an emotional measure of success, and by the Bhutanese way of thinking, if you pursue happiness, you’ll be more productive too. We applaud this as a concept, but the trouble is no one agrees on how to measure this type of success, or even if we’re using the right term for it.
    Happiness is a tricky