April 24, 2025 • Brooke Siem
Years of Factual Optimism: What the 51% Theory taught me about living well
On March 8, 2017, I published a post on Medium entitled, “Finding Happiness Through Factual Optimism (Even When Life Goes Sideways.)”
The essay, even with its amateur prose that now makes me cringe, explained the system I created for myself to objectively track my progress when I was healing from antidepressant withdrawal and fifteen years of chronic depression.
At the time, I recognized two things:
- Feelings are not facts. A bad day or a bad week, due to withdrawal or otherwise, always seemed to negate any of the good. Because the scale felt so unbalanced, I couldn’t see that I was getting better because it still felt so shitty to feel shitty.
- No matter how often I journaled about gratitude or filled a gratitude jar, I couldn’t connect the gratitude practice with a better life. And because every guru talks about how gratitude is the key to healing, I felt broken and stuck, like I had no chance at getting better when I couldn’t even do this basic thing that everyone else seemed to be able to do.
So I did what I do best—go in a completely different direction and find a way to quantify the shit out of my feelings, then measure them against a very low bar of success! Because fuck gratitude, right? To quote myself from my book, on page 100 of MAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS: Gratitude is the bow we tie around our brand of shit to convince ourselves our particular pile of shit is a pretty pile of shit.
My feelings have changed on this, as I’ll address later, but at the time, rejecting gratitude was a form of taking back my power. I was just trying to survive. Gratitude was too advanced, and I needed to aim lower.
The lowest bar, I reasoned through a black and white lens, was that life would be worth living if it trended positive 51% of the time. That’s 2.6 “good” days per week, where “good” is defined by having the day itself trend 51% positive. String enough 51% days together, and you’ve got a 51% life objectively worth living. How’s that for data you can’t argue?
With a yardstick in place, I set about tracking and quantifying the data with the objective of a 51% Lifetime Happiness Average, whereby my choices were validated by default. My goal was never to reach a Utopic level of constant joy. I knew 100% Lifetime Happiness was impossible, but even 80% felt like a stretch. The gratitude gurus lived at 80. I just wanted to dig myself out of 20.
So, at the end of each day, I opened a journal and assigned myself a Daily Happiness Rating based on how the hell I was feeling at that moment. I used a 0-100 scale to allow for nuance. The difference between 49 and 51 was monumental, so it seemed right to give respect to the weight of each integer. Still, knowing that feelings aren’t facts, I didn’t overthink the number. Good morning, bad evening? Give it a 48. Horrific day filled with intrusive thoughts? It gets a 10. A window in the world of withdrawal, in which I didn’t break down in tears? Assign the day a 60 and hope for a 61 tomorrow.
Then, I plotted it all on a line graph.
The drop in February occurred when I went into antidepressant withdrawal. The uptick in August happened when I boarded a one-way plane to Malaysia and was temporarily spellbound by the thrill of a new place. Then, predictably, the high wore off leading to a September crash, followed by an uptick.
When zoomed out, this looks like a person healing. Which, it was. But zoomed in, the day-to-day felt volatile because it was:
My monthly charts from 2016 would reflect a much lower day to day experience, but in February 2017, nearly a year into withdrawal, I was having more 51% days than not. Still, when I went down, I went down hard.
Plotting this over a lifetime, as defined from the year my father died when I was 15 up until the end of 2017:
This is how I proved to myself that I was, objectively, getting better. I could not argue with the system I put in place. The only metric was how I felt, and I didn’t need to rationalize why I felt one day was a 38 while another was a 64. They just were, and that was good enough.
This process allowed me to have bad days, even bad weeks, while knowing that the only goal was a 51% lifetime average. This low bar both took all the pressure off and allowed me to look at individual decisions and determine how they’d affect my overall happiness average. Some decisions were easy. Making my bed certainly contributed to increasing my chances of a 51% day, and so would going to the gym rather than getting ice cream.
Other decisions were more nebulous or didn’t seem to have a clear upside. When those choices came up, I trusted that I’d banked enough smaller 51% decisions (like making the bed) to make up for a choice that might lower the overall average. Over time, I became better at recognizing when a choice was good for me while also forgiving myself for the days when things just fucking sucked.
I stopped tracking in early 2018, when I stabilized enough for the graphs to get boring. When the graphs got boring, something magical happened: I recognized gratitude.
What I’d missed about gratitude is that it is a feeling, not a thought. You cannot think yourself into it, which is why gratitude journals never worked for me. I was too full of muck for the feeling to appear, but once I cleared enough of the muck and analyzed all my little day-to-day choices, I began to notice the little spark of gratitude—a lazy moment in the sun with my dog, the smell of coffee, the color of a flower—all of which eventually grew into a campfire.
That is when I finally understood that gratitude is the way out of suffering. Because once you build that campfire, the world is filled with logs to keep it burning. Even in during painful experiences or crushing, a strong fire stays lit.
It is this duality that makes for a life truly lived at 100. For a long time, I thought a Lifetime Happiness Average of 100 was unattainable because no one can be happy all the time. This is true, of course, but what I know now is that the 100 contains within it all human emotions and experiences. To live at 100 is to experience the full depth of despair and uncertainty because it is matched by intense awe and love.
I know this because I now know love in a way I didn’t before. I know how love is all at once the most painful and beautiful experience, one that simultaneously makes you want to hold on to every moment and also die immediately, just to stop the ache of losing it. It is extreme and all-encompassing, encasing all the meaning of 0-100 within it.
What a gift it is to feel it, to not only want to live in a world bigger than 51%, but to welcome the extremes on either end. Where black and white, dark and light, good and bad are no longer opposites, but integrated expressions of a life well lived.
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