This is far from a mature field of inquiry, but there are hundreds of recent papers out there, and the one-sentence version is that once you're above poverty-level wages, material goods don't make you much happier, but things like family, community, hobbies, and physical health do. In short, these people have spent 50 years proving what our grandmothers have been telling us since the dawn of time.

And this made me think -- a lot -- about my own life. Why am I working 50 or 60 hours per week instead of 35 or 40? Why do I want granite countertops instead of maple ones? Why do I obsess over my spreadsheet of freelance assignments and payments? Was it a good idea to leave San Francisco when I had a ton of friends there and very few in Chicago?

I've been half-joking to friends that this story changed my life. In reality, it didn't do all that much, though the research did allow a productivity/efficiency-obsessed person like me to come up with a justification for hanging out with friends until 2 a.m., or playing guitar, or writing fiction, or spending three hours cooking potato gnocchi, or all the other things that until recently I thought of as a sort of "waste" of time. Now, after I play guitar for an hour, I often feel the same way I do after a good run. That is, "this was a good thing for me" -- in other words, I give myself permission to do the things I wanted to do, but that used to make me feel guilty. If you're Type A, I recommend you try this, it's fun

And if these ideas (especially about government policies to help us do this) seem common-sense-a-priori-obvious to you, check out two blogs by the Cato Institute's Will Wilkinson: the now-defunct (but fully archived) Happiness Policy and his main blog The Fly Bottle, which often explores the topic.

One other thing I wish I put into the story that didn't make it: the idea that a lot of this stuff is mostly worthless to Americans who are making less than $30k per year and don't have health insurance, and especially for the billion or so people living on less than $1 per day. Before the richest among us (despite the fact that I make less money than almost everyone I went to college with, I include myself in this category) start focusing on increasing our subjective well-being measures from 7.5 to 9.3, we need to do more for low-income citizens. That may be through lefty big-government programs or nonprofit charities or libertarian legal/regulatory changes that encourage people to work, but it's selfish of us to think about a happiness policy that doesn't include helping the disadvantaged.

Jeg føler mig bedre tilpas, når det hele ikke ligger fremme og flyder og derfor elsker jeg også de æsker og kasser, jeg sælger i min netbutik med brugskunst, for her kan man let og elegant lægge de små dimser væk, der ellers får den mærkeligste plads.

Men jeg blev da specielt begejstret over at finde de 6 daglige gøremål hos housewife.dk. På under en halv time om dagen kan du med en simpel rutine lette den daglige oprydning betydeligt og komme hjem til et hus, der ikke straks skriger på en omgan oprydning. Og hvis du kan få overtalt resten af familien til at deltage i de 6 daglige gøremål, ja så e du nået langt. Se de 6 gøremål her.