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?