Happiness Log

So lately I've been thinking about the past a lot. In particular I find myself thinking back to happy moments in my life and trying to decide if things were better back then. I've decided that nostalgia and other psycological effects make it impossible to accurately compare different periods of your life in terms of happiness. So, I came up with a brilliant solution. It exists on my computer desktop in the form of a file call "best life ever.xls". Yes this is a spreadsheet in which I rank every day of my life on a scale of 1 to 10. Now on the surface, this might seem like a stupid idea. And if I bother to think about it for a really long time, I might be inclined to agree with you. Nevertheless I believe there are some great advantages to logging the relative happiness of each and every day. Firstly, it's a lot easier than keeping a diary. Frankly, I don't often feel like writing after a long day of work and can't be bothered make a journal entry. The sparse postings on my blog should make this fact clear. Secondly, by giving a numerical value to ones general happiness, all kinds of data manipulation can be performed. For instance, after ranking each day for say 3 years, you could graph the data and look for general trends. Now this isn't to say that the graph will be 100% accurate in showing how happy you were, but it would give you a rough idea. If you were honest with yourself you could see which year, month and day were the best. You might even be able to make correlations. Say you had a girlfriend for a year. You could track that initial euphoria of meeting someone new and watch it peak and then wain with boredom. If you continued to keep data for say 10 years, you could literally compartamentalize your life into good and bad times. You might see that having kids or getting married really made you miserable. Now a big problem with giving a quantitative value to anything qualitative is the use of subjectivity. In this case, I think that's the whole point. You may not be sure why you suddenly think of an average day is a 6 instead of a 7, but that could tell you that you are less happy than before. Of course, complete subjectivity is a hard place to start from. You might not have anything interesting happen to you one day and ask yourself "What score should I give?". To deal with this issue, I created a basic ranking system to use as a guideline should there be any doubt. I wrote it in about 2 minutes so it is very rough. Here it is:


ratings
1 - worst possible day (ie someone close dying)
2 - incredibly bad (multiple horrific events)
3 - just plain hurtful (something that damages life in lasting ways)
4 - really bad day (everything seems to go wrong)
5 - not horrbile but far from good ( ie worked all day with few breaks)
6 - decent day (unpleasant but bearable)
7 - good day (did some fun things)
8 - great day (something really fun)
9 - amazing experience (something new, exciting and worthwhile happened)
10 - best day ever (really really amazing stuff. Eg. Sex with hot girl, huge job promotion etc)
11 - that rare nearly impossibly good day that must be cranked to 11 (ie winning the lottery)


I hope that if anyone reads this they'll take a few seconds each day to start their own happiness log. It might just tell you a lot about yourself some day.