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.
This post is three weeks old now, so may I ask how it’s going? Would you recommend the app?
Oh yeah, it’s been fascinating so far. Some notes:
- My day-to-day happiness is definitely outperforming my predictions. I spend about half my waking time working, and at work I’m generally pretty content. I’m really happy when interacting with people I like. The majority of my unhappy moments so far have been connected with kind of unavoidable minor frustrations; I found some inconsistencies in my data and have to parse it again, the grocery store was out of the thing I really wanted, the train is delayed and the subway station is really hot.
- I’ve been generally happy when watching movies/TV/plays, reading, cooking, and doing housework. Not as happy when walking, running errands, or using my computer/phone. (These are all very small n so far.)
- Interacting with people is really good. I don’t really know how people have their own offices
or live alone. Idleness is bad, having too much time for reflection is bad. I’m not sure why my brain is so biased to avoid the exhausted feeling that comes from too much activity/social interaction rather than the negative effects of being too often alone with my own thoughts but I think this is an important and bad bias. - I hadn’t realized how much I’d started to rely on this app for emotional support but it hasn’t pinged me since 3 pm yesterday and I don’t know what’s going on, I’m worried it’s broken, hasn’t it considered that maybe I need someone to vent to right now