Happiness Logging: One Year In

[-]moridinamael11y210

I can confirm that doing this makes you less happy. Right now if you asked me whether I was happy, I'd say, sure, I'm happy. But if you asked me to make a 1-10 rating, I'd put it at maybe a 6. Well, that doesn't seem so happy anymore. It seems lacking relative to where I could be. Do this for a few days and you realize you're almost never at or near a 10. It's grinding, and your subjective experience of your life becomes defined, not just measured, by the happiness score.

[-]free_rip11y40

I used to rate my happiness and productivity on 1-10 scales at the end of each day, and this was my experience too. I've since dropped that part of my diary routine, instead focusing on just writing the three best things and three things to improve/do more/do next. I still have an idea if I look back later of trends of happiness and productivity, since I can see some good things are better than others, but I don't have that feeling of disappointment in myself every time I don't make an 8+ for both.

That said, the only way I can analyze this is looking back over it, I can't input it to make informative graphs or the like.

[-][anonymous]11y30

What about alternate measures?

Binary comparisions like: "Would I rather: Experience the previous hour exactly as it occured a second time, or X for an hour?". Where X might be : sleep, or some reference experience.

The abscence of negative mood. This isn't the same as happiness, but something like boredom or anger could have a clearer floor, or lend itself to a "Present, a little, none" scale.

Or more specific questions. Here's a PDF of an adjective based scale. An idea is to pick out only those adjectives that you already expect to vary.

[-]Joshua_Blaine11y00

I think ordering/ranking experiences would be more successful (in general) than trying to just give them scores.

An example of such a system: Every ping asks you to briefly describe the previous hour, and then shows you a list of every other ping you've written for the last week/month or so. You then put the description wherever it fits in the list, above everything that was less fun to experience, and below everything that was more fun.

In this way it's very easy to notice happiness trends (whether or not you're getting happier or sadder over time) without worrying about associating the same activity with the same score, even if it's becoming less or more fun to do.

[-]Steven_Bukal11y00

My worry in that case would be present conditions bleeding into the memory and evaluation of those earlier pings. For example, I'd expect that when you're hungry your relative ranking of past ping moments is going to change to more heavily weigh moments when you were eating.

[-]itaibn011y50

Overall my experience with logging has made me put less trust in "how happy are you right now" surveys of happiness. Aside from the practical issues like logging unexpected night wake-time, I mostly don't feel like the numbers I'm recording are very meaningful. I would rather spend more time in situations I label higher than lower on average, so there is some signal there, but I don't actually have the introspection to accurately report to myself how I'm feeling.

I've also been suspicious of happiness surveys for a similar reason. One theory I have is that a large portion of the variation in happiness set-point is just that different people have different tendencies in answering "rate in 1-10"-type questions. It would be interesting to test how much does happiness set-point correlates with questions such as "rate this essay from 1 to 10". Another test for this theory that is far more like have actually been conducted already is to see how well happiness set-point correlates with neurological signals of happiness (the difficulty being here that the primary way to determine whether a neurological signal signals happiness is through self-report. Nonetheless, if the happiness set-point correlates with any neurological signal then it more likely that this signal plays a role in happiness than in inducing high number ratings).

[-]ShardPhoenix11y50

Perhaps one way to improve the measurement would be to structure the question in terms of preference rather than direct measurement - something like "what is the least-good thing I'd rather be doing right now" (ie as a kind of upper bound to current happiness). But there's also an issue of energy level etc.

[-]jefftk11y40

Perhaps one way to improve the measurement would be to structure the question in terms of preference rather than direct measurement

This is a really cool idea. But even preference has issues. For example, I like contra dance (a kind of social dancing) a lot, and have a good time when I go. The feel in the moment is one of my favorite things. If you asked me, "would you rather be contra dancing" I would usually say yes. But if you look at my behavior, I don't actually go that often anymore, even when I do have free time. How do you tell the difference between me irrationally underconsuming something I enjoy vs me overestimating how much I enjoy it in posed comparisions?

[-]jsalvatier11y00

For certain formulations of this, that objection seems irrelevant. Imagine that instead of a 1-10 scale, you had a ranked list of activities (or sets of activities).

[-]MaximumLiberty11y00

Like opportunity cost in economics.

Max L.

[-]ShardPhoenix11y40

Have you found any interesting correlations?

[-]jefftk11y20

Have you found any interesting correlations?

I haven't. I'd actually be a little more interested in trying some randomized experiments; with correlations it's so hard to know if there's really a common cause.

[-]Username11y40

If this experiment in what makes you happy is a) not turning up interesting correlations, b) takes time out of your day to log and curate, and c) is actively making you unhappy, then why are you still doing it? It seems like the one singular result is that doing the research is bad for your personal well being. If I were you I'd cut it out of my life right now.

[-]jefftk11y00

In general the more data I have the more useful it gets. I don't think it makes me much less happy, and it doesn't take very much time, so I'm willing to pay those small costs to keep the data analysis options open.

[-]diegocaleiro11y20

One thing worth mentioning about introspective accuracy is that the numbers people give are similar across cultures, across time for a single person, and they lit similar areas of fMRIs (Layard 2005). What about using a 1-5 scale?

[-]jefftk11y40

What about using a 1-5 scale?

To some extent I already am. I've never scored my happiness above 8 or below 4, though I can imagine being in states outside that range. This same preference for leaving room for more extreme future experiences would lead me to use a 1-5 scale as a 2-4 scale.

[-]John_Maxwell11y20

Interesting. Re: phone timewasting, I've found having a crappy phone with a slow data connection helpful for avoiding this. Also saves money. (I have a Kyocera Event on Virgin Mobile's Beyond Talk plan, FWIW.)

[-]jefftk11y20

I do enjoy timewasting, and I want to continue to do some amount of it. For example, I count reading facebook, lesswrong, people's blog posts, etc in this category, and if I stopped doing that I would feel both less connected to my friends and less engaged with the world's ideas. But the marginal returns diminish, as always, and sometimes I do it when I should be doing something else.

[-]John_Maxwell11y00

One idea for improving the quality of your ratings: instead of taking quantitative, numerical measurements, do qualitative observations (write a paragraph verbally describing how happy you've been lately). Then, after a while, look over your accumulated qualitative observations and try to cluster them or develop some kind of rubric or decision procedure that allows you to quickly code your happiness level. (For example, you might be able to do some kind of happiness binary search... if you know what your median level of happiness feels like, you could diff that against your current level of happiness and figure out which way the diff went, then after that diff yourself against the 25th/75th percentile level of happiness. That'd give you 4 buckets. Depending on the shape of your happiness distribution, you might find this percentile-based approach not all that useful, especially since the distribution of your happiness might change depending on the circumstances, etc.)

[-]jefftk11y30

instead of taking quantitative, numerical measurements, do qualitative observations (write a paragraph verbally describing how happy you've been lately)

Part of my goal with tracking happiness is to better understand my in-the-moment experience of life as opposed to my remembered experience. This means any tracking probably needs to be quick and frequent.

[-]Deremensis11y00

I think part of the problem here, and why writing a qualitative description is a good idea, is that forcing yourself to "quantify" your happiness (an incredibly difficult thing to do even in the best of circumstances) is going to inherently lead to inaccuracies. I'd even consider making the argument that having to quantify your happiness could inadvertently lead to you actually being -less- happy. Imagine it - you feel fine one moment, then, as a result of a ping, you now have to evaluate exactly how you're feeling and your day so far and turn it into a number. What if that number doesn't come out the way you want it to? Now you're unhappy.

That's a lot harder to do with a qualitative observation, where you can quickly spitball how you feel at the immediate moment without in-depth contemplation.

[-]John_Maxwell11y00

Makes sense. I think this is still compatible with my suggestion though: you could write a paragraph describing how you feel in this moment. It would be slower for a while but if you followed the rest of my advice you could go back to quick tracking fairly soon.

[-]jefftk11y20

I guess the problem is I'm not even willing to go through a single week where at random times I might need to write a paragraph on my phone? My current system is fast enough I can almost always immediately respond to a ping, and if it would be too socially awkward I can decide what I'm going to enter and then enter it in a minute or so when there's a break.

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Happiness Logging: One Year In

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