About Lantern

A happiness tracker for
adding more happy.

Lantern started with a question that took a year to phrase right: what would a happiness tracker look like if it was designed for the day you’re actually having?

It’s a small thing on purpose. One slider for today’s energy. A handful of tags for what you did. A line of text, if you have one. Done before the kettle whistles. After a couple of weeks, patterns surface that no listicle was ever going to give you.

It’s built by one person, in the open, for people going through their own transitions. Here’s the story.

The founder
Alistair St Pierre
Founder · writes everything here

Hi, I’m Alistair. I run a digital marketing agency, and I’ve lived with severe anxiety. Lantern grew out of both of those things.

Years ago I taught game design. When my students graduated, work in the field was painfully hard to find, and I watched bright people get pushed toward the first job that would take them, often into careers they’d feel stuck in. I didn’t want that for them. So I started reading everything I could about how people actually build work and lives that fit, including the Designing Your Life framework out of Stanford.

I tried to build a version of this tool back then. It was before AI, the development was brutal, and I burned out and got too sick to finish it.

Eight years later, going through a transition of my own, I needed it again, so I finally built it for myself. Lantern is the thing I wished I’d had: a quiet daily record of what gives me energy and what drains it, so I can put more of the good back in on purpose. I made it public because I doubt I’m the only one who could use it.

It’s early, and it’s honest about that. No fake reviews, no inflated numbers. If you try it and something’s broken or could be better, I genuinely want to hear it: hello@happiness-daily.com.

The research

Rooted in Stanford research.

The idea that you can test and design your way to a more energising life isn’t ours. It comes from Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who teach the Stanford Life Design Lab and the popular life-design course at Stanford’s d.school. Their core ideas, prototyping small experiments before big leaps, and logging energy with the “Good Time Journal”, are exactly what Lantern’s daily check-in is built to make easy.

We lean on a wider body of work too: self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan) on autonomy and meaning, Amy Wrzesniewski’s research on job crafting, Gallup’s engagement findings, and Stutzer & Frey’s work on commuting and wellbeing. We dig into these studies, and how to apply them, across the blog.

Sources: Burnett, B. & Evans, D. (2016). Designing Your Life. Stanford Life Design Lab, lifedesignlab.stanford.edu.

More happy.
Kept daily.

That’s the whole pitch. Track your happiness daily. Keep what’s lit.

Why Lantern