Good evening! Yesterday’s 1000 words on SEXUAL INTERCOURSE seemed to go down pretty well, which has made me think that putting clickbait titles on the rest of my blogs mightn’t be the worst idea. If today’s blog suddenly changes to have the title ‘This computer can GUESS your MOOD?!?!?! *SHOCKING*@!@>’ then hopefully you’ll understand why. Before we dive into the topic, I had two very nice people say they enjoyed reading about the topic of intimacy and relationships. If those two very nice people, or indeed anyone else, want to read some PROPER GOOD articles about intimacy and relationships then I’d recommend Annie Lord. She’s a dating columnist for Vogue and her writing (and the artwork that’s commissioned for each article) is really, really amazing. https://www.vogue.co.uk/profile/annie-lord
Alright. Let’s get into this Happiness Calculator, then. I think the best way to describe what this is and what it does is to show you a graph. Stop yawning. It’s a good graph.
Based on measurements that I’ll explain in a bit, researchers at the University of Vermont have been able to plot the above big timeline which shows the average level of happiness of the human race over the past decade or so. They’ve designed a machine called the ‘Hedonometer’, which measures our level of happiness in real time. A few things should stand out:
1. Christmas Day, represented by the little sharp upward stalagmites that you can see every year, is pure and wonderful and makes people happy.
2. Acts of terrorism, natural disasters and incidents of racial injustice are not very good for our collective happiness. (wow!)
3. We as people don’t tend to have our happiness lifted much by one-off world events; Christmas, New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day give us some nice little lifts on an annual basis, but there are no huge high points other than that, especially compared to the dozen-odd unique low points we’ve experienced.
4. This past year our collective level of happiness has fallen off a fucking cliff.
The first two points are fairly painfully obvious, but in my opinion it’s worth having a think about the last two. Is it simply the case that there’s always more bad news than good news, or do we as a society just not celebrate to the same extent that we get sad? And sure, COVID has completely turned everything upside down, but why is it that separate horrible things which occurred this year, like the shooting of protestors in Nigeria or the murder of George Floyd, have made us many magnitudes sadder than the horrible things of previous years?
One important detail to this Hedonometer which might point us towards some answers to these questions is that the graph was plotted using what clearly is the most reliable way of gauging the world’s mood: Twitter.
That’s right. The creators first made a list of around 10,000 of the most popular words in the English language based on how often they appear in song lyrics, newspaper articles and books, and then asked thousands of people to give each of them a ‘happiness score’ between 1 and 9. Stuff like “laughter”, “love”, “joy” and — randomly enough — “butterflies” are in the top 1% of happy words, with the killjoys of “suicide”, “terrorist”, and the slightly less traumatising “headache” ranking among the bottom 1%. The machine then analyses 50 million tweets per day, tallies up the average score of the words used, and spits out a ‘happiness rating’ as a result.
And for the most part, that’s grand. The graphs all make sense and match up to pieces of good and bad news throughout recent history. Here’s what the last 6 months look like in a bit more detail:
There are some pretty clear dips, none more so than at the end of May when the murder of George Floyd and its aftermath sent the world’s collective mood into total freefall. But again, even in this smaller sample size it’s very difficult to find even moderately high points other than occasional national holidays and a non-fascist being voted into the most high-profile job in the world.
So what’s going on? Well, certainly the fact this is all based off Twitter means we can probably take things with a few pinches of salt. Twitter — and, if we’re being honest, social media in general — has led to people exposing the most negative aspects of their lives more and more. Facebook has a feature called ‘Memories’ where they show you status updates you posted on a given day x amount of years ago. Usually, I’m brought back into a world where 2011 me is writing about how pleased he is to get home from school or asking his friends to like his status in return for a compliment. Nowadays, though, the kids around my age who grew up posting happy little life updates are tweeting about how stressed they are with work and uni or how upset they are at the recent childhood-ruining development of YouTube no longer putting the little red ‘HD’ symbol beside videos in 720p.
How upsetting.
Yes, dear reader, of course the world has changed too. The human experience feels more polarised and negatively charged than ever before in my lifetime at least, and that’s to entirely ignore the financial and environmental crises that are about to suddenly pop up on our agendas again once a COVID vaccine becomes widespread and we move on to the next crippling issue. ‘Good News’ has always existed and still does, but nowadays it finds very little uptake from a beaten down, cynical and weary general public. No one’s tweeting about the local news story of the cat that got rescued from up in the tree. There are bigger fish to fry. Frankly, as ridiculous as it may seem, I think the observations we can gleam from the magic Happiness Calculator are spot on. The good stuff doesn’t feel as good anymore, and our low moments have never felt lower.
If we’re being honest, no one has any clue what’s on the horizon for 2021. There are some pretty promising probabilities: that the health crisis will be at least diminished with the help of vaccines, for example, and that as a result we’ll be able to freely travel and see the people we love and go to concerts and sports matches and parties again. But we can be absolutely certain neither of that nor of anything else. I suppose with that in mind, you could say that the biggest thing that people are in need of is just some kind of hope, even if there are no guarantees. Our level of happiness could do with it, certainly. Fingers crossed.
