Hacking Happiness (32 page)

The Present and the Future

Implementing changes based on happiness will take more time. But whereas many leading economists ten years ago discounted the study of well-being and happiness as frivolous, as Jon Hall notes, “they’ve changed their minds.” I asked Hall where he felt the Beyond GDP movement and happiness metrics would evolve in the future:

In five years’ time I think people will be using this type of data to implement policy. In twenty years this could be very radical. Well-being could actually change the way that the machinery of government is put together. We’d have a re-alignment of how different ministries work together and how decisions are made. It will change everything.
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I also had the pleasure of interviewing Enrico Giovannini for his thoughts on well-being and happiness in regard to public policy for this book. Giovannini is the minister of labor and social policies in the Italian government under Prime Minister Enrico Letta and played a formative role in steering the OECD to focus on well-being and progress in his role as chief statistician for the organization. He launched the Global Project on the Measurement of Progress in Societies, which fostered the setting up of numerous worldwide initiatives focused on the Beyond GDP movement. For his work on the measurement of societal well-being in 2010, he was awarded the Gold Medal of the President of the Republic of Italy, and has also been a member of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress and chair of the Global Council on the Evaluation of Societal Progress established by the World Economic Forum. I asked Minister Giovannini how he first became involved in studying issues around well-being and happiness.

In 2001, the OECD was running a project on measuring sustainable development. As an economist, I found this to be a fascinating effort. I was intrigued by the idea of integrating economics, social and environmental measures that also had an intergenerational component, and a long-term story.
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I asked the minister how he dealt with skeptics who may have thought studying well-being or happiness was impractical in light of the more financially focused metrics of the GDP.

At the beginning it was very difficult to take these ideas forward, especially with the economists and statisticians. But this has changed for several reasons. Firstly, several governments are taking these types of measures very seriously, including the French, German, Australian, Japanese,
Korean, and Chinese leaders. Everybody understands that just increasing income is not enough. You have to look at all dimensions of life that include social and environmental factors.
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However, recessions and other economic issues do impact the study of well-being. As Minister Giovannini noted:

The idea of measuring and implementing happiness metrics can be very difficult to apply. During recessions a lot of people lose their jobs, which means their happiness decreases. So finding the right balance of policies, where you can look at all dimensions of a person’s life, is essential in both emerging and developed countries. However, these types of crises also push citizens to ask for policies with greater justice to allow for fair distribution of resources, along with resources that are more sustainable. So now the measurement battle around well-being and happiness is almost won, but our next step is to create policies that can include these different elements.
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Mass Happiness

“Governments aren’t put into place just to manage the GDP. Governments should make people better off.” Daniel Hadley is the director of Somerstat, a program focused on analyzing municipal needs for the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, and providing forums for direct citizen participation in civic engagement. Beyond its fame as the home of Marshmallow Fluff, Somerville has become a leader in the usage of happiness indicator metrics to drive policy change. In the
New York Times
article “How Happy Are You? A Census Wants to Know,” author John Tierney documents how
residents were sent surveys asking people to rate both pragmatic aspects of their communities (schools, housing) as well as the beauty of the physical landscape. Overall, the city was trying to gauge the answer to the question, “Taking everything into account, how satisfied are you with Somerville as a place to live?”
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Daniel Gilbert, renowned Harvard University professor, social psychologist, and author of
Stumbling on Happiness
, helped Daniel and the staff at Somerville create the survey questions, which were also inspired by the work Prime Minister David Cameron has been doing in the United Kingdom with his Happiness Index. Daniel also utilized the groundbreaking work of the Knight Foundation and their Soul of the Community project to build Somerville’s survey as he told me in an interview for
Hacking H(app)iness
:

I borrowed from the best and specifically looked for questions that correlated with resident satisfaction. Nobody to my knowledge has combined a municipal survey with a happiness survey. We hoped we could mine the data and find out what municipal services could make people happy.
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Now that the city has collected two years’ worth of data, Daniel and his team will start to be able to analyze trends in hopes of creating a Happiness Index that could be sharable with other cities such as Santa Monica that are also working to create measures of well-being to help citizens. While a snapshot of data from one year’s survey is helpful, information from two surveys means the mayor’s office can try to implement relevant policy change based on citizen input. And this idea is already working. In one simple yet charming example, Daniel had data that the number of trees in someone’s neighborhood can affect people’s happiness. So the city planted more trees and raised resident happiness as measured by survey response.

While policy change can get caught up in bureaucratic red tape
or bipartisan rhetoric, it doesn’t have to. The transparency from the Somerville surveys means the mayor’s office will need to be responsive to citizens’ requests in order to maintain trust and participation. But Daniel feels the results have been positive so far, and sees much more work to be done. From our interview:

This framework is still in its infancy. I get excited about the future. I see every city doing some version of the Happiness Index. By 2030 we’ll have metrics that will let us know that happiness shot way up in certain regions of the country. An average citizen can look at a map and see where happiness is the highest. Citizens in the future will be informed about where happiness is at its peak and why.
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As citizens we can take comfort in the fact that cities like Somerville are working to incorporate data that genuinely impacts our lives. Metrics that go beyond GDP don’t just work because they offer theoretical promise. They also have to work when put into pragmatic practice.

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So it’s decided. While the GDP may have been a useful metric for a time, its fiscal-only focus ignores a number of issues central to accurate measurement and policy creation. It largely ignores women or people who stay at home with their kids but don’t “produce value.” While it is helpful to have any standard that the entire world agrees upon, it doesn’t make sense to cling to a metric that was developed almost one hundred years ago in a completely different time.

So, gross domestic product? Thanks for playing. But now?

Ba-BYE.

  19  

GETTING H(APP)Y

An excessive focus on happiness would seem to be almost disrespectful to the wide range of possible human emotions that lift us up, teach us, and make life rich and varied. A more thoughtful goal, or intention, or reason to try tracking mood, is simply to increase awareness. The act of pausing to check in with yourself about how you’re feeling in different situations, as well as looking back to similar situations in the past, can help you see trends and influences on your mood that you may not ever have noticed.
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ROBIN BAROOAH and ALEX CARMICHAEL

T
O MOVE BEYOND
GDP on a personal level, let’s give it a new name:
gradual daily progress
.

Hacking H(app)iness is not supposed to be an easy fix. It’s a process that begins with a bold declaration to radically examine and optimize the way you think about money, self-worth, and joy in your life. In my case, seeing my Klout score and realizing how others could broadcast data about my life spurred the journey that led to the writing of this book and the founding of the H(app)athon Project. The process hasn’t been easy, but that’s one of the main reasons it’s been so utterly satisfying.

I hope you’ll get to experience an epiphany in your life as I did. A clarifying moment where you’re inspired to make a change and have a sense of direction on how to proceed is a blessing. My epiphany, however, came not too long after my father passed away.
While I wasn’t looking for a radical life change, I had been in a state of deep introspection for a number of months dealing with my dad’s death. I was open to receiving the epiphany when it came.

So to be clear: Hacking H(app)iness is not about “finding your happy place” or always being in a positive mood. It’s about giving yourself permission to evaluate what brings you meaning and purpose. You
want
this process to be hard. You
want
it to get ugly, at least in terms of honoring a process that is
real
.

There is honor in seeking truth. I don’t know what yours is. My goal in this chapter is to encourage you by providing some closing examples and stories to help you start exploring.

The Value of Values

Konstantin Augemberg is a statistician with a passion for quantifying his own life. His Measured Me blog and work is an “ongoing personal experiment in self-quantification and self-optimization” with an ultimate goal to “empirically demonstrate that any aspect of my everyday life can be quantified and logged on a regular basis, and that the knowledge from these numbers can be used to help me live better.”
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I interviewed him about his recent Hacking Happiness experiment,
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which Konstantin was kind enough to say was partially inspired by the H(app)athon Project. It focused on analyzing which aspects of his life made him happy and why.

Do you genuinely think people can track their emotions or happiness?

First, it is important to understand the differences between measurement and tracking. Measurement is a process by which a certain construct (latent or tangent) is expressed in terms of numbers or categories. Tracking is a consistent, repetitive measurement of the construct in everyday settings, often “on the go.” You can measure calories burned in the lab setting, in calorimetry labs, in a
hermetically sealed room. But if you want to track your calorie expenditure on a regular basis, every day, then tracking devices like BodyMedia would be your best choice.

Likewise, emotions, happiness, and other latent constructs can be measured objectively and numerically. I am not a specialist, but I would say you can detect happiness and emotional states by observing activity of different parts of your brain via a CAT or MRI scanner. However, devices that could enable you to track happiness or emotional states “on the go,” in everyday life settings and relatively continuously, do not exist yet, at least to my knowledge. But you can still measure and track your happiness daily using short self-questionnaires. Even asking simple “How happy am I?” questions once or twice a day can lead to amazing discoveries, provided that you keep track of your answers.

What were the results of your Hacking H(app)iness experiment you were most surprised by? Encouraged by? And can other people replicate what you did and hack happiness?

The most surprising finding was how much living according to my personal values affects my happiness. In addition to recording how happy I am, I was recording how important some life priorities (family, money, career, friends, justice in the world, spiritual balance) were to me at a given point in time and then how satisfied I was with my attempt to live according to these values.

For instance, I would wake up in the morning and ask myself how happy I was. Then I would ask how important it was for me to earn a lot of money, have a successful career, have good relationships with family and my partner. Then I would ask myself how satisfied I was with my current financial situation, my career, and my relationships. Then I would repeat the process in the afternoon and evening. The experiment lasted one month.

Then I looked at the difference between expectations and reality for each of these life priorities and how these gaps were related to
my happiness. I thought life priorities like money and career would have a considerable influence on my happiness. As it turns out, they had no impact whatsoever. But being able to express myself, being healthy, and being independent and spiritual were important predictors of my happiness. In other words, every time I felt like it was important for me to be creative and independent but was not able to express myself or act freely, my happiness level would decrease.

Other people can certainly replicate this experiment. I am not sure, however, that they will get similar results. Unlike in regular science, results of self-tracking experiments are not necessarily generalizable; what worked for me won’t necessarily work for you. And that is all right, because that is the main goal of self-tracking and self-quantification: Analyze your own life to find your unique solutions to your own problems. And yes, if a person feels that he is unhappy, then he or she should definitely give “hacking” a try.
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