Pursuing Happiness

I've found some interesting stuff online over the past week or so, and they've gotten me thinking. While there's a lot of despair over economic woe and wars (and rumors of war, to coin a phrase), there seems to be an interesting counter-cultural movement afoot online. Here are some things I've run across of late.

The first is a blog called "1000 Awesome Things." It's been around for a few months, but I just discovered it the other day. The premise is to create a list of 1000 things that bring simple joy into one's life--stuff like "When you’re really tired and about to fall asleep and someone throws a blanket on you," or "The first scoop out of a jar of peanut butter." They're all small things, and, while some of them make me go, "meh," a daily dose of awesomeness is pretty nice.

The second site I found recently is Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project," which has been around for a few years, but which I just found today on its new Slate blog. Rubin's project, part of a book she is working on, is to explore the things that make us happy and identify commonalities among sources of happiness. A bit less concrete than the 100 things blog, and certainly rather academic in tone and nature, this blog gives some interesting insights into happiness.

All of this gets me thinking that it would be fun (and probably good for me) to post my own small pleasures, those little things that I often overlook. Stuff like getting to the bus stop right before the bus pulls up, or when Evan doesn't throw his snack on the floor. Here's to a happier year in 2009!