If I could just monitor my happiness indicators, then I could catch myself being unhappy

by phil on Friday Mar 21, 2008 3:02 PM
infovizing your life

I'm imagining some sort of daily chart that looks at all of my Happiness Indicators and spits a number or average back to me. I'd like to put this on some sort of display like a LED clock.

Indicators That I'm Happy Today:

  • Whether I sing in my car or not
  • If I log into AIM or not
  • Whether I stick to my regularly scheduled tennis
  • How many of the four nightly sink routines I do (floss, brush, wash, anti-acne wash)

Indicators That I'm Not Happy Today:

  • How many hours of First-Person-Shooters I play per day (i.e. Halo, Team Fortress 2)
  • How often I log into MySpace
  • Which of these topics do I think about while eating: atomic warfare or Obama
  • How large is my stack of bills to pay and papers to file

For example, I sang in my car today. Awesome.

But yesterday and for the previous 3 days, I played Team Fortress for a total of 20 hours, didn't log into AIM, and I consistently thought about nuclear fallout while eating. Not Awesome.

I think there're some alternatives to this system though:

  • Upon waking up, have a notebook that has a hundred lines stating: "I'm ______ happy today."
  • Get a girlfriend/boyfriend who loves you and inquires, "Honey. You haven't been singing today. What's wrong?"
  • Pray every night.

Comments

Zeb said on March 24, 2008 11:31 PM:

What would you do when you caught yourself?

Get a guilty look on your face and then shake your head disappointedly at yourself, and then feel ashamed that you let yourself down again and then begrudgingly forgive yourself and promise to forget, but not really.

Philip Dhingra said on March 25, 2008 2:54 PM:

I think the problem that this is supposed to solve is that I'll spend maybe 3 days being unhappy and not notice. And when I do notice, that coincides with when I start figuring out solutions to what's making me unhappy.


Creative Commons License