The Encyclopedia of Happiness

On journaling, search-ability, and insight

Ally Bruschi (AB) is a partner/managing director at Daly.

Ally here. The idea of gratitude journaling might sound hopelessly saccharine, but I’m here to tell you that it’s not only a worthwhile daily exercise for keeping your brain oriented toward the positive but also a high-return investment in your long-term ability to understand yourself. 

Back in 2013, I had the novel idea to start writing down one thing every day that made me happy. I wasn’t feeling particularly happy at the time, so I figured this exercise could help me see past my current situation, and appreciate the small things that make a day and a life not entirely bad. 

So I started a Google Doc, called it the “HappyMappy” and began a habit of nightly documentation. 

Early entries included small, singular pleasures—“I ate a hot roll with warm butter and did homework in a room that smelled like freshly baked cookies”—as well as more significant-sounding triumphs that I no longer have any context for: “I apologized for something I had done wrong and it made me feel better even if it didn’t make the situation better.”

10 years later, the doc is now 421 pages long (!) and has become a living record of the big and small moments that have made up fully one-third of my life.

Why is this interesting? 

The value of a compendium of daily reflections is as much in the writing of it as it is in the retroactive access to its contents. 

In terms of the latter, there’s something to be said about having a corpus of yourself to come back to at regular intervals—and even mine for ideas—when you’re feeling stuck or lost. In those moments, there’s an element of self-reliant pride that comes from drawing inspiration from your own past. 

More than just existing as a record, then, the HappyMappy has also become a vital tool for self-reflection, wherein I can scroll my way to deeper understanding of the patterns that tend to lead to my happiest moments, over and over again. 

The doc has thus become a place where I can now index the types of things that consistently make me appreciate life—time spent in deep conversation with old and new friends, extended escapades in nature, receiving small often edible gifts from loved ones—the patterns of which are less obvious than you’d think they’d be, in the daily living of it all. 

For me, the fact that this doc lives in the Cloud and not as a physical journal enhances this value. 

Diehard journalers who swear by writing in a physical book every day may balk at the idea of using a Google Doc as my medium, but I think the digital format actually works better in this case. There’s something about the doc’s search-ability—the “CTRL-F” function of being able to instantly zoom back to any day in any year, and search any name, location, or term—that bestows its true value as a way to gather information and insights of “who I’ve been” to help inform the everyday decisions (should I spend the money on that trip? Should I say no to the 14th wedding invitation? Should I turn down an opportunity to be a more interesting person, out of fear?) that build themselves up to “who am I now.” 

I’m routinely surprised by realizing there’s been a consistent throughline between the things that have brought me joy all along, even if they feel like a new revelation each time they happen. It turns out that self-discovery is cyclical. 

So, equipped with the knowledge of that circularity, I can embrace future decisions and weighing of options with a deeper understanding of that ever-elusive question, “how do I live in a way that will be most likely to lead me to something approximating a happy life?” 

Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Ally (AB)

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