I am taking a break from writing about Walden Pond (which could give me enough material to write about for weeks) to talk about two things I saw on the internet last week. They are both kind of related because they are about things that make people "feel bad" which is one of the pillars in the First Splendid Truth about happiness that Gretchen Rubin writes about in The Happiness Project.
One thing that makes me feel bad is email. An out of control inbox and an overly complicated email filing system that makes it take forever to file things, then almost impossible to remember which folder I put things in once I've filed them. My salvation came from an article on the Financial Times website last week called Ten Email Commandments written by Tim Harford. In a very funny, well observed article, one of the commandments is to stop filing emails! Just dump them all in an archive folder. He even cites academic research supporting the efficiency of this! So I have stopped filing emails this week for the first time ever and it's made such a difference already. No more procrastination about where to put things. No more time wasted!
The other was an article from the Huffington post: Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy. The article argues (via some funny drawings) that happiness (or unhappiness) results from reality being better (or worse) than your expectations and looks at this in the context of work. It also talks about the role of Facebook in warping people's expectations, which is pretty fascinating really. It's worth a read (thanks Sarah for sending it to me!).
