It's not seen as self-indulgent to pursue happiness now

Gretchen Rubin explains why self-knowledge and better relationships are crucial for her own contentment

- SALLY SAUNDERS

When most of us take up a hobby, we might do it at the weekend, or perhaps every week or two. Not Gretchen Rubin.

When the best-selling author of The Happiness Project starts a hobby, boy, does she start a hobby. She's visited the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York every day for more than five years (closures excepted), and now she has a new passion. 'One of the things I'm doing in 2025 is I'm water colouring every single day,' she tells me. 'I'm kind of an all-or-nothing person, and so, for me, it's easier to do something every day.'

It's this single-mindedness, one could even say obsessiveness, while focusing on something so ephemeral as art, that makes Rubin so fascinating.

On the surface she is, to use her own terms, a classic Upholder (Rubin created her Four Tendencies framework almost a decade ago, in which she categorises us based on our response to expectations, of which more later). She has a ferocious intelligence: she went to Yale Law School and edited the Yale Law Journal before clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and she's gone on to teach at Yale Law.

But rather than follow this path further, perhaps making partner at a law firm, or becoming a judge herself, she has turned herself into one of the world's leading researchers on the subject of happiness. And, unsurprisingly, she's not done it by halves. She blogs daily on the subject, sends out weekly newsletters religiously detailing five things that have made her happy that week, and has a weekly podcast. Oh, and she's written half a dozen best-selling books on the topic, that have sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than 30 languages.

So how can one be so laser focused on something so intangible as happiness? And does she feel pursuing this feeling so doggedly has helped her find it?