Happiness = Smiles − Frowns

August 28, 2025. Thirty days without Lonna. I went to the Social Security office to start the survivor benefits paperwork — appointment in mid-October to actually do it. Dropped three bags at Goodwill on the way home. Found out a friend had died the day before. The kind of day where you don't know what to do with yourself so you just keep moving.

I wasn't sleeping through the night. I woke up that morning worrying about the chocolate chip cookie recipe. And the marble cake. Lonna's recipes. Somewhere in my head at 3am, those felt like the most important things in the world to not lose.

I wrote one line in my journal that day.

I need to employ Steve Woz's formula for happiness. Happiness = Smiles − Frowns.

It's simpler than it looks. The frowns are mostly not in your control. Loss happens. Grief arrives without asking. You wake up at 3am worrying about a cookie recipe and there's nothing to do with that feeling except feel it. That variable is largely fixed.

The smiles are different. More in your control than you'd think. You go get them. Memories count — but new experiences count more. A memory is fixed. A new experience is alive. It has surprise in it.

And community multiplies the whole thing. A smile alone is good. A smile with your people around you is better. You can manufacture solo smiles — a long drive, a sunset from the balcony, the van on an empty road in New Mexico — but community is the amplifier. Turns out this is just true.

You can't always reduce the frowns. But you can almost always add more smiles. That's the whole formula.

Happiness is not a persistent state. It's a running score. Goes up, goes down. The goal is not to eliminate the frowns — good luck — but to keep generating enough smiles that the balance stays positive most days.

I wrote something else on Day 30 that I don't want to gloss over. The thought of living for 20 more years without Lonna is unimaginable. Why would I want to do that?That's the frown column talking, and it was loud that morning. The formula doesn't make that question go away. It just gives you something to do with the rest of the day.

Go find a smile. Preferably with other people. Preferably something new.

Woz had it right.

Casey King cared for his wife Lonna for over two decades. She passed on July 29, 2025. He is writing The Caregiver's Trap: A Roadmap for When the Caregiver Needs Care — for other caregivers, and specifically for his son Brian.

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