It seems I have stumbled into happiness.

What I am learning about happiness is that we all know what we think it is we want, but we don’t do as well at guessing whether or not it will make us happy.

I’m reading a book by a Harvard psychologist author named Daniel Gilbert that is helping me understand how it was that I bumbled my way into happiness.

That is a precious thing to learn in life.

We were Zooming with friends during the Pandemic one night, and Maria said: “you know it’s strange when we had a lot of money were unhappy and worried about money, and now, we have no money, and we have everything we need and are much happier than we were.”

My grandmother taught me to be suspicious, if she had heard Maria say we were happy about not having money,  she would have spit three times over her shoulder.

I’ve been thinking about happiness, money, and life ever since then, and I can’t get what she said out of my mind.  Every word was accurate, but how did this happen, and what have I learned from it?

When I lived on the farm in Hebron, and before I met Maria,  I was a best-selling author. And I had a lot of money in the bank.

A movie had been made about my life; TV news reporters flew into the farm to meet me and interview, I had a book contract and plenty of money – I gave most of it away.

I ended up being as miserable as I ever was in my life. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are crazy, you will get even crazier.

Today, living with Maria, who I married a decade ago, on this small farm, no longer interested in writing books, no longer a best-selling author, no longer appearing in TV shows or trendy NPR stations and no longer with much of anything in my bank account or stowed away for the future, I am happy.

We have everything we need, as Maria said.

People always tell me they read my blog even if they disagree with me. I always answer that I don’t need to be agreed with, only thought about. People tell me that my writing should be in the newspapers, but I am so glad I am not writing for the newspapers.

I slowly have come to see that I am doing what brings me pleasure and feels good and makes me happy.

I can write what I want, no editors to correct my spelling, or tell me what to write.

Somehow, without really knowing it, I got to this happy place.

How can this be true? In Hebron, I had everything I had always wanted.

I never wanted to be here, doing what I am doing. Yet I love it and realize that this is exactly where I belong—doing some good, writing what I want every day, taking pictures, loving my wife, and my life.

I’m reading this book by Daniel Gilbert; it’s called Stumbling On Happiness.

I think there are some answers in there for me.

Gilbert says most of us make at least three crucial decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do, and with whom to do it. We choose our towns and our neighborhoods; we choose our jobs and our hobbies, we choose our spouses and our friends.

It’s easy to forget, Gilbert writes, that we are among the first human beings to make these decisions. For most of recorded history, people lived where they were born, did what their parents had done, and associated with those who were doing the same.

For the first time in human history, happiness was in our own hands.

Gilbert wrote about one theory of happiness.

A Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli suggested that the wisdom of any decision could be calculated by multiplying the probability that the decision will make us happy by the utility of getting what we want.

By utility, Bernoulli means something like goodness or pleasure.

In most circumstances, says Gilbert, we can roughly estimate the odds that our choices will get us close to what we want.

But the problem is that we can’t quickly or accurately estimate how we will feel about it when we get it.

I think the reason I have dogs I love so much is that I get them in this way: I imagine how I will feel, I imagine what my life with them would be like, I ignore anyone who tells me what to do  (they are not my friend) and dig deep into understanding what it is that I want to do.

And I don’t just want it. I work very hard to find exactly what my heart says I want.

For example, most of us know we want a lot of money, especially in our culture.

But happiness, he found, doesn’t come from measuring dollars. Wealth does not tell us what we will experience when we have it. How much goodness or happiness can those dollars actually buy?

Hardly anyone can predict whether wealth will make them happy, even though almost everyone thinks they can.

I always imagined I wanted to make a lot of money, and for a while, I did make a lot of money. I had a 90-acre farm, restored four barns, a house, and a lot of acres of land.

I was not happy even though there were many things I loved about that farm.

I was not writing what I wanted; I was not living with someone I wanted to live with, I was lonely and friendless, I found the farm overwhelming and exhausting and expensive, it was so much more than I needed or could handle.

I didn’t anticipate the recession either, and was caught in the real estate crisis and couldn’t sell the farm in the four years I tried. So I went bankrupt.

I had given up on the idea of love or sex and lived in a remote town where there was almost no chance of meeting anyone. My marriage disintegrated, we got divorced.

That was about the time I began to realize that I was happy, right after I lost almost everything I had, including my sanity.

I re-married,  moved to a farm I never imagined I wanted or would live in. I drove by it often for nearly 15 years and never once wished I was living there.

The recession destroyed my book publishing life, and so I focused my creativity on my blog, something I never imagined doing for most of my life and started taking pictures, which I had never done.

I married a creative person, an artist, which was something I desperately needed but never once thought would make me happy.

And I had – have – no money and an IRA that wouldn’t fund a week at the shore.  I married someone who loves her work and also don’t have much money. Most artists don’t.

How do I make sense of this? The answer, I think, is that the value of something cannot be predicted on its price, but rather on the utility it yields.

I have less money, but I am so much happier with what it is the money buys:

a simpler life, the freedom to write what I want, the freedom to take the photos I want to take (something I never did before), to live with the animals I want, and the opportunity to share my life with someone who wants many of the same things I want, but who is fiercely independent and different from me.

I found love, something I never had but also wanted.

I am learning that I can’t reliably guess what will make me happy, and I am learning what it is that brings me goodness, pleasure and fulfillment. Those things have nothing to do with fame or fortune, and just can’t be measured in terms of money.

And it isn’t that money isn’t essential.

We all need to pay our bills. And I am. After years of punishment, my credit rating is good again. I have found the strength and power to control my own life.

But what I was taught about money and security and meaning was almost all bullshit. Rich people make a lot of money persuading other people what they should want and what they should need, so they can then get even richer and the corporations even fatter.

Since there is no limit to the absolute greed of the modern corporation, there is also no limit on their manipulation of people into seeking what they are taught to want. Then they so often discover it can’t make them happy.

Bernoulli was wrong, says Gilbert,  in thinking that money in the bank was the only way to measure probability and utility.

There are, he wrote in his book, many things other than the size of a person’s bank account that influence how much contentment they derive from the next dollar.

I often valued things more when I wanted them then when I got them. I am mortified to think of all the things Maria and I have thrown out that I  bought thinking they would make me happy.

I often bought expensive glasses that would make me look writerly. But I am a writer, I know who I am, I don’t need to look the part.

Two weeks ago, I bought a pair of glasses because they were blue, and I love them. They bring me a utility, that is a pleasure. I just wanted to bring some color around my face.

It didn’t hurt that I figured out that my insurance company paid for them.

I have suffered significant losses and small losses; the small ones hurt much more than the big ones.

So how did I get happiness without really choosing it?

Without a reliable formula for being happy – there isn’t one – I do what only our species can do: I imagine it. I try to visualize it, to mentally transport myself into the future, and ask myself how it feels to be there.

I don’t want things, I imagine them. And I am better at being creative than living by formulas.

When I imagine things, I can’t ignore what I am feeling right now. I know I can’t predict the future, but I am much more careful about thinking that what I want for the future will make me happy.

Maybe, maybe not.

I have learned that there is no simple formula for finding happiness. But if I can’t guess confidently what I will want, at least I can better understand what I may not really want.

I can sense what makes me stumble.