About Kevin Sandler
Kevin Sandler is a professional speaker, workshop facilitator, writer, and life-satisfaction researcher exploring what makes people love their lives—not just what makes individual moments happier.
Since age 17, Kevin has tracked his emotional experience in 15-minute increments, creating more than 200,000 data points across nearly a decade of his life.
Through high school, college, relationships, career changes, travel, van life, property ownership, and life in multiple regions of the United States, he documented how different experiences affected both day-to-day happiness and long-term life satisfaction.
Rather than offering one universal recipe for happiness, Kevin helps people identify the specific people, places, goals, challenges, freedoms, and experiences that make their lives feel worth living—and then test what happens when they deliberately build more of those conditions into their lives.
A Decade of Life as an Experiment
Kevin continued measuring his happiness because he became obsessed with understanding why some days felt incredible and others didn’t.
What began as an quirky personal habit slowly turned into something much bigger. He kept tracking through high school, college, relationships, career changes, living abroad, working as a barista, buying property, moving across the country, living out of a van, and traveling to all 50 states while working full-time.
Along the way, the experiment itself kept getting larger.
Change the city. Change the job. Change the people. Add freedom. Remove stability. Try ambition. Try routine. See what happens.
And that’s when he ran into the problem that changed the entire project:
You can have a lot of happy moments and still not love the life they add up to.
He had spent years asking: “What makes a moment happier?” but the question he actually cared about was: “What makes someone look at their life as a whole and think, I want this to be my life?”
That became the experiment.
Speaking & Workshops
Kevin brings this work to students and young adults through speaking and interactive workshops.
His flagship workshop, “THE HIGHLIGHT REEL: What Your Life Has Been Trying To Tell You“, helps participants identify the experiences and conditions that have mattered most in their own lives and choose one change to test going forward.
His approach combines personal data, behavioral research, experimentation, and lived experience rather than prescribing one universal formula for happiness.
Kevin studied industrial and systems engineering at Virginia Tech and has published research related to positive emotion and well-being.
His long-running happiness-tracking project has been featured by The New York Times and Upworthy.
After more than 200,000 data points and nearly a decade of experimentation, Kevin’s conclusion is not that there is one perfect way to live.
The point is to figure out yours.