The idea for Project Gift Drop came to me a few years ago while reading a book review in The New York Times. I don't remember the name of the book or the woman who wrote it. Hopefully that will change, because she's played a role in inspiring this project. Her book addressed some old ideas about practical approaches to attaining happiness and turned them upside-down. Gratitude journals, charitable acts and attaining goals... well they still have merit but she warns against letting your exercises become rituals and chores. Based on clinical and field studies, she confirmed the existence of a happiness "set point" to which people tend to return, no matter their life circumstance. The key is not to establish an ideal circumstance, but to manufacture new sources of happiness before one returns to that "set point".

I thought about the things that made me happy, and I saw the truth is her words reflected in several things in my life. OK... feeding the birds might seem like a regular chore to some, but the ever changing variety of birds, and the possibility of seeing some new species that happened to be passing through the region, always held my interest. Maintaining birdfeeders makes me happy. It is a charitable act in its own way, and that is something she addressed as well.

She also discussed the relative bliss inducing merits of succeeding and pursuing success. Apparently, her studies indicated that a finalized success had a short term, positive impact on a person's overall level of happiness. This is not to suggest that accomplishing a goal is a bad thing. A constant state of pursuit, without the reward of success, would become brutal, but by re-establishing new goals or engaging in projects with shifting goals, one might never need to return to their "set point". Based on that, I concluded that an open ended pursuit that varied in nature from moment to moment (even if the variation was not drastic) might, according to her theories, be effective in sustaining an elevated state of happiness.

I'll spare you all the sequence of logic that brought me from that point to the idea of Project Gift Drop, but here is the conclusion of that logic. I decided, just for me, to put together gifts and drop them in random locations. That's it. No return. No knowledge of the recipient- just a check back to see if someone took it. To be certain it was clearly meant to be a gift, a card or note would be attached. Since then, the ideas of my girlfriend and co-administrator of this site, combined with my own, the nature of the packages, cards and procedure has been substantially refined. Part of that evolution was the idea of making this a community based, multi-participant project. That is how you have come to be reading this. We welcome your participation, dear reader, and the following sections will explain how to participate.


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