8. Find your purpose and live it. One benefit of religion may be that it gives people a sense of meaning and purpose. Without a magical deity to give you purpose, though, you'll have to find out for yourself what drives you. It may take a while to find it though, and you may have to dip your hands and mind into many fields. But once you find a path that strongly motivates you and fulfills you, take it. (Of course, you might not find one purpose but many.) Having a strong sense of meaning and purpose has a wide range of positive effects.41 The 'find a purpose' recommendation also offers an illustration of how methods may differ in importance for people. 'Find a purpose' is not always emphasized in happiness literature, but for my own brain chemistry I suspect that finding motivating purposes has made more difference in my life than anything else on this list.
I think that's the biggest factor of my happiness. I have a long-term open source project that I believe in and I work on it in all my spare time. Little by little, it's getting closer to one day being very useful in many ways.
It's an experimental software development tool, largely inspired by Bret Victor's talks. It's similar to projects like Light Table, Zed editor, but it's nowhere near as complete and focuses on a single programming language (Go).
I worked on it full time for a year after finishing my master's degree, culminating in a first place winning demo submission to the LIVE 2013 contest [1].
By then, I ran out of money so I got a full time job and continue to work on Conception in my limited free time. By now, I'm working on a pure Go implementation of Conception [2], which is a lot more advanced in some ways, but is still needs a lot more work before it's actually usable and helpful to other people. Someday, when the time is right, I want to get back into it full time, because it really requires a lot of work.
