Yesterday I downloaded Track Your Happiness, an app that sends you notifications at random times throughout the day, asking you what you’re doing and how happy you are at that moment. While I’ll be interested to see what the data shows after a while, I’ve already noticed something cool.
I think there’s sort of a positive feedback loop to noticing my happiness level. It goes something like (notice current happiness level) -> (update towards average happiness being closer to that level) -> (life satisfaction updates in the same direction) -> (happiness updates in the same direction because either “wow my life is so great, I’m happy all the time” or “oh god despite all my success and privilege I’m still unhappy what even is the point”).
And since I’m more likely to be unhappy when alone/idle/introspecting about my emotions, and more likely to be happy when in a flow state, I notice my unhappiness more than my happiness. Track Your Happiness corrects for that bias.
So yeah. It’s never occurred to me to wonder whether I’m happy while immersed in a conversation at work, because immersion, and because I don’t actually have a choice about whether or not to have most of these conversations. But today I got a notification and realized that you know, I was really enjoying the experience.