Last September, I started the 100 Happy Days challenge. The idea is fairly simple. Every day for 100 days straight, using your social media platform of choice, post a picture and brief caption of something that made you happy that day.
When it comes to the Internet, I have extreme commitment issues — my senior year album on Facebook lasted about halfway through the first semester — so when I started this challenge, I didn't actually expect myself to complete it. But I did.
For the first 60 or 70 days, I made a daily Facebook post about something that made me happy. I was really enjoying the challenge — it was nice paying attention to things I appreciated, big and small. Some days it made me actively seek out something that would make me happy. Not just for the post, but also to get my daily fix of happiness. Maybe that wasn't the intention of the challenge, but I liked it and I think people should feel more comfortable seeking out happiness.
However, when I came back to school after Thanksgiving break, I was less than happy. I was more homesick than I'd been before I left. I was in an end-of-semester slump and out of motivation. I felt distant from my college friends and spent most of my time alone, missing everyone at home.
The first day I felt this way, I sat with Facebook open on my laptop and racked my brain for something that had made me happy that day. And I came up blank. First, I felt like a failure. Then I considered taking a picture of my bed and saying I was glad to go to sleep. But that wasn't particularly true. I decided that I would rather break the rules of the challenge than have it not be genuine. So I went to bed without a happy days post and repeated this process for several days.
A few days later, I had a lot of fun with a carpentry project at work; I had another happy days post to make. I was back on track, and a few weeks later I finished the challenge, having skipped a few more days here and there.
I came to the realization that, like the Internet in general, this challenge was a good training tool. It put me in the habit of reflecting on things and people I appreciate, and it made me feel more comfortable voicing this appreciation. It made me more aware of my feelings in general and it taught me that it's completely okay to want to be happy.
100 days is a long time, though, and after a while in the challenge, I had unrealistic expectations about happiness. At my college, there's a weird pressure to be happy; we boast that our student body is one of the happiest, and that's great. But this environment and my own challenge had put me in an idealistic place — I thought I had to be happy every day. While that's a nice goal, it's ridiculously unrealistic.
The "real world" overall is not a happy place. There is war and terrorism and poverty and pollution and suffering, all over the place and all the time. I'm very fortunate that these global issues don't affect my day-to-day way of life. I'm aware of these issues, however, and I have problems and battles of my own, like everyone else. These things weigh on me, and they make it difficult to impossible for me to be happy every single day.
At the end of my 100 happy days, I decided that the point of the challenge, for me, wasn't about being happy every day. It wasn't even necessarily about becoming a happier person. It was about awareness: of what makes me happy and of my own feelings towards happiness. I don't feel the need to be happy every day, I just want to find things to smile about as often as possible.
"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning to dance in the rain." — Vivian Greene
