Track Your Happiness

[darkemeralds]

Somewhere during my deep dive into self-quantifying, I got hooked up with Track Your Happiness. Apparently it's some Harvard guy's doctoral research project. Every six months or I get a series of 50 happiness surveys, three per day at random times.

Each survey takes about a minute to complete. They all start out "How do you feel?" with a bad-to-good slider. Most of them include questions about what you're doing, whether you have to do it, and whether you want to do it.

They ask about sleep duration and quality the previous night. Where are you? Alone or in company? (And if alone, interacting with anyone--a distinction I appreciate.) Occasionally they'll pop in a question about sexual activity, or Facebook use, or hours of exercise in the past week, or how much control you feel like you have over your future.

You get personal results as a series of charts and graphs. (Presumably there will be mass, collective results at some future time.) I just finished my fourth survey.



Here's a sample of my happiness by location, over the four surveys.











Additionally, it seems that I'm happiest when I'm doing something that I want to do but don't have to do. When I'm either totally focused or not at all focused on what I'm doing. When I'm alone (though that just reflects that I'm a pretty happy person and also alone most of the time).





I must have been in a period of creative angst there...

Comments

[sffan]

What doesn't shock me at all is that work is almost always on the bottom. I bet that in the grand scheme of things that it will be the most common unhappy denominator. Which is so horrifyingly sad, considering how much time most of us spend at work compared to all of the things that make us happy.

Of course, work is what enables us to pay for the things that make us happy...it's a terrible catch-22.

[darkemeralds]

Yeah, there's work at the bottom of the list, and it wouldn't surprise me if that were pretty much universally true. It seems to me that that's one of biggest wrongs in life. What a waste of minds! And how silly that we make everyone wait till they're old and tired to find out what they really want to do.

I keep hoping that The Singularity will bring about a better way. But it's hard to imagine, isn't it?

[hunningham]

I like my work, I really do and I am so bloody lucky. Almost everyone I know just struggles thro' it. If it's not the job it's management, or office politics, or commuting or lack of time for family which kills them.

Actually what struck me about this was how good you are at the self-analysis & tracking. It's not just this, but the hacker's diet and dress-your-truth as well. I know you said that this was just a minute, but I doubt I'd manage that consistently. (Not false modesty, realism and accepting limitations.)

Myself, I now have to work out some more happy-making things for myself and do them.

[darkemeralds]

I think it is sadly rare for people to love their work. For one thing, to keep loving it, it seems to me, one would have to change it quite often. And with that change would come uncertainty and insecurity, which is why you behold me, 25 years on, in work that has only rarely given me real satisfaction. I feel lucky, however, to have had at least some challenge, interest and growth, no backbreaking physical labor, and very decent pay and benefits all these years.

Odd that you should mention Dressing Your Truth in conjunction with self-quantifying; it's actually DYT that has made me realize how natural this kind of tracking and tallying is to me (and my "Type"), and how unnatural it would be to much of the rest of the world.

I've come to feel quite passionate about how one size does NOT fit all--not in nutrition, or fashion, or fitness, or work-style or anything. To the extent that every-breath-we-take-every-move-we-make is a form of self-expression, it seems so obvious to me now that we should all find our own way and, as far as possible, live every aspect of our life that way.

What looks like discipline to others feels like fun to me. I'm positive that the reverse is also true. I'm finally learning not to try to be like others, and (more importantly) I've finally understood that my way to happiness is probably not the way for most other people.