Hacking Happiness (11 page)

Does your heart rate increase when you think about playing guitar in a band? Maybe you should act on that. Does your stress level increase at your job no matter what task you’re doing? Could be time to switch divisions or look for new work. Affective sensors and their complementary technologies will begin to work their magic on your life in the near future if you let them. In the case of the H(app)athon Project, global Happiness Indicator metrics also provide the framework of a positive vision for the future not dependent solely on influence or wealth.

Need help defining your own vision? Check in with your data and see what revelations you have to offer yourself.

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QUANTIFIED SELF

Wearable computing devices are projected to explode in popularity over the next year and, with a wave of new gadgets set to hit the consumer market, could soon become the norm for most people within five years. ABI Research forecasts the wearable computing device market will grow to 485 million annual device shipments by 2018.
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ABI RESEARCH

W
E ALL CURRENTLY
have wearable computing devices in the form of our smartphones. Slap a piece of Velcro on your iPhone and wear it on a headband and you’re good to go. In terms of history, if you wore an abacus on a necklace back in the day, you’d also technically be part of the wearable computing movement.

In a similar fashion, quantified self as a practice has been happening since time began. When Eve asked Adam, “Does this fig leaf make me look fat?” she was comparing herself to a previous measurement. If you’ve used pencil and paper to figure out your finances, that form of self-tracking also fits the bill (pun intended).

Quantified self (QS) is a term coined by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf of
Wired
in 2007. It refers to the idea of self-tracking, or “life-logging,” as well as the organization by the same name that helps
coordinate hundreds of global meet-up groups around the world. According to the group’s website, the community offers “a place for people interested in self-tracking to gather, share knowledge and experiences, and discover resources.” Wolf wrote a defining piece about the notion of QS in the
New York Times Magazine
in 2010. In “The Data-Driven Life,” Wolf describes how improving efficiency is not the primary goal for self-trackers, as efficiency for an activity requires having a predetermined goal. Trackers pursue insights based on data collected in real time, where more questions may develop as part of an overall self-tracking process.
²

This notion of collecting data with an unknown goal strikes most non-trackers as odd. In a world that typically rewards productivity above all, how could someone spend so much time measuring his or her actions with no set goal in mind? As with data scientists, self-trackers look for patterns in their actions to form insights versus approaching the data with hypotheses that could color the outcome of their findings.

Measuring your actions without a set goal in mind is hard. We’re trained to think that all of our actions must have a defined purpose resulting in improved productivity. I remember years ago working in a high-end café and getting admonished by my manager because she felt I was moving too slowly. She taught me how to look around the café and quickly assess multiple tasks that needed to be done based on walking clockwise around the room. The lesson stuck with me. To this day I still use this technique in my own kitchen, although the only patrons I need to take care of are my kids getting ready for school.

The downside of this type of harried productivity, however, comes in the toll it can take on your psyche. It’s very difficult not to gauge your success as defined by others, and the plethora of self-help guides touting increased productivity only adds to the stress.

We’re coming into a time, however, when the aggregation of our data will help us automatically become more productive. Ana
lyzing patterns and offering recommendations based on behavior provide a huge increase in productivity and value via personalized algorithms (predictive computer equations based on past actions). Stephen Wolfram, a complexity theorist and CEO of Wolfram/Alpha, notes in an interview with
MIT Technology Review
that he stopped answering group e-mails in the morning because data showed the majority of the issues worked themselves out by the afternoon.
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Sound familiar?

Another key benefit Wolfram describes in the article is the idea of augmented memory, when the aggregate data of our lives will be made available to us at all times. Think of your life as if every word and action were an e-mail stored in a database, searchable in an instant—that’s the idea of augmented memory. The paradigm shift of fully augmented memory will have massive cultural repercussions, both positive and negative. Recording the experiences of our lives in photos and audio or video formats has been limited technically to this point due to battery life of hardware and lack of storage for content. Battery life is improving at a rapid rate, and the evolution of cloud computing (servers that access and store your data remotely, versus being stored on your hard drive) means if we can afford to pay for storage, it’s available. Augmented memory enabled by these technologies will provide for the following types of applications:

• You’re at a conference and someone you don’t recognize smiles and walks toward you. Using facial recognition technology, you can quickly scan past life-recordings to see how you know the person.
  
• You can run tests on your e-mails for the past year for keystroke data (how hard you hit the keys, serving as a proxy for anger/stress) and see what times of the day or week you tend to be emotional and how that affects people’s responses to your messages.
  
• You can cross-reference your GPS data with your e-mails, using sentiment analysis (technology that identifies certain words that infer positive, negative, or neutral language patterns) to identify the places where you are most productive.
  

These examples should show you why quantified self–analysis won’t stay only in the realm of life-loggers or health enthusiasts for long. Hacking H(app)iness, or owning your data in this context, isn’t just about protecting it—it’s about liberating it to be useful in ways it’s never been used before.

Objectivity in Action

Another aspect of self-measurement that’s a challenge for people is staying objective. There’s deep emotion tied to something like losing weight or keeping your house clean. But a key component to quantified self is the skill of articulated observation. I developed this skill over the years as a professional actor and writer. It takes practice to look at a person (or yourself) and simply record what you see. You would think stillness would be easy to achieve, but it’s actually very challenging. We are hard-coded toward bias and judging others. It’s in our DNA as a remnant from our ancient past when we relied on our fight-or-flight mechanisms to keep us safe.

Here’s an exercise you can try to cultivate your nonjudgmental observation skills. Record yourself on video standing and reading a passage of poetry or a passage of a play. Something you’re passionate about. Perform it. Have fun doing it and don’t worry about the caliber of your acting. The focus of the exercise is actually about your response to watching the video. If you cringe watching a recording of yourself, pretend you’re watching someone else and just describe what you see.

Most young actors (myself included) don’t realize how much energy is stored in their bodies that comes out when they recite a
passage of a script until the first time they see themselves on video. For instance, “flappy hand” is a common occurrence with young actors: While saying lines from a scene, their whole body will remain unmoving but one hand will gesticulate wildly as if it’s caught on fire. A good acting teacher will point out the latent energy in the person’s hand and have the actor take a deep breath from their diaphragm (the power center for breathing versus your lungs/shoulders) before starting again. Typically after two or three repetitions of this exercise, “flappy hand” goes away and the actor delivers a more centered and powerful performance than before.

Observation is a powerful tool. A primary trait of a gifted actor is their well-honed ability to observe humans in action. As a young actor, you “play” a character—you want a quick laugh or to milk a dramatic scene and you try to coax a certain response from your audience. That’s death, because it’s fake. For instance, in a comedy, characters don’t think they’re funny. The audience laughs because they identify with the people in the play. A good actor will
inhabit
a character, without judging the person they’re playing and planning for a certain response. As a performer, they may genuinely feel terror in a role while the audience howls with delight.

Here’s a story along these lines from the world of acting. You’ve heard about Method actors so caught up in their roles that they fully believe they’ve become another person. That can happen, but these stories tend to be overblown. As a professional actor, you’ve got to show up for eight shows a week in theater or hit your mark in film or TV. It’s great to be Method and passionate, but if you lose touch with reality, you won’t continue to get hired. This pragmatic aspect of performance also relates to the idea of playing an action in a scene. For instance, you can’t “play” being sad in a scene—sadness is the
result
of not getting something you’re pursuing.

There’s a famous story of the renowned acting teacher and Moscow Art Theatre founder Constantin Stanislavski working with a group of young performers, teaching them the importance
of playing an action in a scene. He asked one of his students to go onstage and sit in an armchair he’d placed there. Given no specific instruction, the young man sat and proceeded to make a series of faces that initially amused his classmates. As time wore on, however, the boy became flustered, unsure of what to do with himself. Nervous laughter from his friends faded into a tense silence. Stanislavski remained unmoving, watching with the rest of the class as a palpable sense of desperation exuded from the stage. After several more minutes, Stanislavski finally told the student he could sit down. The young man leapt back toward his seat, visibly relieved.

Then Stanislavski stopped. “Wait,” he said. “I seem to have misplaced my glasses. I believe they’re under the chair. Would you get them before sitting down?” The boy obliged, dropping to his knees and reaching under the chair. Then he removed the cushion, carefully examining to see if he’d inadvertently crushed the glasses by mistake. He continued looking for a few moments before Stanislavski spoke and said he realized his glasses had been in his pocket the whole time.

When the student sat down, Stanislavski revealed that the entire time the boy had been onstage, before and after looking for the glasses, had been a lesson in acting. When the boy pantomimed for his friends, he was going for an
effect
. When he was looking for Stanislavski’s glasses, he was pursuing an
action
. As Stanislavski noted to the class, when the student was actively en-gaged in trying to accomplish a goal, however mundane, he was riveting to watch.

This story illustrates a simple fact: Truth is revealed by action. The boy was initially uncomfortable because he was trying to fabricate an experience for his friends. This same principle applies to our lives and quantifying our actions. By taking action and measuring our data without judgment, we gain insights about our behavior we didn’t even necessarily set out to study.

But you won’t know until you start to measure.

The Numbers on the Numbers

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released the first national (U.S.) survey measuring health data tracking in their
Tracking for Health
report. Here are some of their top findings:

• 46 percent of trackers say that this activity [self-tracking] has changed their overall approach to maintaining their health or the health of someone for whom they provide care.
  
• 40 percent of trackers say it has led them to ask a doctor new questions or to get a second opinion from another doctor.
  
• 34 percent of trackers say it has affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition.
  

Particularly interesting is information about how people handled their tracking:

Their tracking is often informal:

• 49 percent of trackers say they keep track of progress “in their heads.”
  
• 34 percent say they track the data on paper, like in a notebook or journal.
  
• 21 percent say they use some form of technology to track their health data, such as a spreadsheet, website, app, or device.
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These are some powerful statistics. Almost half of the people measured say self-tracking has changed their overall approach to help. That’s huge. While they track progress in their heads, the growing popularity of quantified self apps means technology will soon increase the number of people measuring and improving their health. Hacking H(app)iness in the form of health data is a great place to start seeing how valuable it can be to measure and
optimize your life. However, QS goes beyond measuring just the physical components of your health data.