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Two weeks of noticing what actually registers.
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Tool 77 · Develop yourself
Am I happy, or is my life simply working?
A guided 14 to 18 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. A life can work and still be flat. That is worth knowing.
GUIDES
You have named it. Now spend some time on it.
Each Guide gives you a clear way to look at one subject in your own time. Choose where to begin. You do not need to work through everything.
The comparison
What you are actually measuring
Work out what you are comparing your life against when you answer that question.
Where this often ends up: The comparison you have been using, named and written down.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
What is already working
The parts that are working
Build an honest account of what is good, in enough detail to protect it.
Where this often ends up: A written record of what is worth protecting and what would put it at risk.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around thirty minutes
What is left
What deserves your attention
Look at what is not working and decide whether to change it, protect it, accept it or give it more time.
It may also end with a clearer view of something, or with nothing that needs doing.
Around twenty minutes
This Guide is free, like everything else in The Clearing.
You can see what it covers before you begin.
Start this Guide
Answer for the week, not for the life.
Flat is not the same as wrong.
Where were the good hours?
What you'll look at
- 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
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
The honest answer
02
The week
03
The good hours
04
What follows
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
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
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
This session works on the whole of you, not one part of your life. Nothing is scored. At the end, you are asked once which part of your life this touched most. You can answer none.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
What you would say when asked.
02 · Test it
Put one thing you actually enjoy back into next week.
See more ↓
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 have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Want to go further?
Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
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
Before you start
Reading, if you would rather understand the question first.
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
See the thinking ↓
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.
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.