I started to think about this question when I was invited to a departmental get-together at the chair’s house. While it was a bit of a tense situation—dining in the chair’s garden while talking to the bulk of senior colleagues, who all seemed to have it figured out—I was intrigued by a side discussion of a few people.

I shifted my chair a little so I could be part of their talk circle, sitting on white outdoor chairs while sipping my refreshments. And then one woman kicked off the discussion by saying:
“Considering that academics are not very happy people…”

And there she lost me. I drifted into mind-wandering, up to the point of asking myself:Sophia, are you a happy academic?

Knowing that this question was doing far more than demanding an answer on the spot, this was the moment I started to embark on tracing my happiness as an academic.

Maybe partly motivated by wanting to contradict the woman’s perception of academics not being the happiest set of people; maybe partly because that statement made me realize that happiness won’t just find me as an academic—doing what an academic does on a daily basis—without me creating space for it.

So I started “happiness-hunting.”

Like other people embarking on geocaching journeys, I set out to trace moments of happiness in my academic as well as personal life. By writing a so-called happiness journal and logging daily for a period of almost a year, I became conscious of moments and experiences that might otherwise have gone unnoticed and drowned under my daily academic duties—if not written down and consciously experienced in that way.

“The Happy Academic” blog is a way of sharing how I trace happiness in a sometimes very tense and pressured academic environment. It’s not about being happy all the time, but about consciously infusing a maybe broken system with positivity and hope for change—all the while trying to remain as happy as possible.

So if you are an academic and you have not yet given up on the idea that we might help change the system (and of course the world!) for the better from within, then this blog is here to put a smile or two on your face—which can be a nice counter-experience to the frown line we usually carry on our faces from always being very focused and working really hard.

After all, how else do you stay happy?