Book
The Good Life
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed lives across decades. One of its clearest lessons is that the quality of our relationships matters enormously to how our lives unfold.
Tool 77 · Develop yourself
Am I happy, or is my life simply working?
A life can work and still be flat. That is worth knowing.
A guided 14 to 18 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Answer for the week, not for the life.
Flat is not the same as wrong.
Where were the good hours?
What you'll explore
- 01The answer
- 02The week
- 03The good hours
- 04The reading
A note from Mark
People ask themselves whether they're happy and then answer for their whole life, which is an impossible question.
I find it more useful to ask what last week actually contained. Where were the good hours. Who was in them.
A lot of lives are sound and thin at the same time. Nothing is wrong, and nothing much is good either.
That's a different problem from being unhappy, and it usually has a smaller repair.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
The honest answer
02
The week
03
The good hours
04
What follows
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you said when asked
- 02What the week actually contains
- 03Where the good hours are
- 04What is flat rather than wrong
- 05What is actually wrong
- 06The rival reading
- 07What deserves protecting
- 08Where this goes next
What now?
01 · Save it
What you would say when asked.
02 · Test it
Put one thing you actually enjoy back into next week.
Explore this further ↓
What I would do
- 01
Answer for the week, not for the life.
- 02
Write down the hours that were genuinely good.
- 03
Notice who was in them.
- 04
Say honestly whether anything is wrong, or whether it is simply thin.
- 05
Change one thing about the shape of the week before changing the life.
Test it
- 01
What did last week contain?
- 02
Which hours were good?
- 03
Is this flat or is it wrong?
The alternative
The usual reading is that an unhappy person needs to change something large. Often the evidence shows a week with almost nothing in it that the person enjoys, and the repair is closer to an hour a week than a new life. The reverse happens too. Somebody describes a full and pleasant week and still says no, and that answer deserves to be taken seriously rather than argued with.
Think about this
- What you would say if somebody asked you today.
- What last week actually contained.
- Where the good hours were.
- What is flat rather than wrong.
- What you would notice first if it improved.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
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Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
What makes me feel alive?
If the week is thin rather than wrong
Further thinking
The Good Life
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert
Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert
Explore the thinking ↓
Article
A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind
Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert
Sampling thousands of people at random moments, the study found that minds wander around forty seven per cent of the time, and that people were less happy when their attention was elsewhere than on what they were doing, almost regardless of what that was. Where the mind goes when nothing demands it turns out to be worth looking at.
Book
Stumbling on Happiness
Daniel Gilbert
Gilbert's subject is how badly we predict our own future feelings. We imagine the highlights of a life we do not have and quietly leave out the Tuesday mornings. That is directly useful when a desire keeps returning: it lets you ask whether you want the life attached to the thing, or one missing ingredient inside it, without dismissing the desire as a fantasy.
Article
The Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model
Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky
Why the best parts of a life stop registering. Adaptation is efficient and it is also why people trade away arrangements that were working, having quietly stopped noticing them. The prevention research is more useful than the treadmill headline: variety and continued attention slow it, and pure acquisition does not.
Book
The Happiness Trap
Russ Harris
The plainest introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy, where values are treated as directions you keep moving in rather than rules you either obey or break. It also makes the case that rigid rule-following, even about admirable things, is one of the more reliable ways to make yourself miserable.