And, the site says, the project, which has been reported on by NPR, LiveScience.com and a whole host of other news sources, was created as part of a doctoral research study at Harvard University.
Intrigued (and of course happy at the notion of contributing to research) I clicked on the “get started” button.
That’s when I became unhappy.
Turns out, the study enables you to “track your happiness, and find out what factors — for you personally — are associated with greater happiness” and contribute to the researchers’ understanding of happiness ... but only if you have an iPhone.
Which I don’t.
Nor do I plan on acquiring an iPhone, either; for this study or any other purpose.
Not that I have anything in particular against iPhones. I’m sure they are useful — even necessary — for many people. But I’m perfectly happy without one. And it makes me unhappy when I spend money on things I don’t really need.
Still, I’m feeling a little left out here. And not that I have the credentials to question the research protocol of a Harvard study, but this a-little-left-out-feeling has, nevertheless, inspired a few questions:
1. Why track happiness via iPhones? I get that it's technologically easier, but that leaves out a lot of people who don't have an iPhone but who would be, ahem, happy to participate via, say, a good old-fashioned pencil-n-paper log. This forced division, at least by this study, of people into iPhone-haves and iPhone-have-nots rather implies that the only people who have anything useful to contribute are those who have the resources and/or desire for an iPhone. Yet another division in an already too-fractured culture ... so sad.
2. Wouldn't limiting the study to only iPhone-haves skew the results? What if it turns out iPhone-haves are generally more happy than non-iPhone-have-nots? Or generally more miserable? Of course, there's no way to know that if iPhone-have-nots are excluded from the study.
I suppose we iPhone-have-nots will have to track our happiness all by ourselves. Which seems rather lonely — a generally most unhappy feeling.
Hmmm. So far, not being able to participate in the Track Your Happiness project has enabled me to identify a few things that make me unhappy: spending money foolishly. Feeling left out. Loneliness. Faux-divisions of people.
Perhaps I should also track a few things that do make me happy. Let's see ... a sense of community. Family. Friends. Sufficient resources for needs and a few wants, without lapsing into clutter or gluttony. Creative fulfillment. Intellectual stimulation.
And, of course, there are all sorts of questions one could ask about happiness that go far beyond the am-I-happy-or-not metric, such as: Why do people knowingly keep themselves from doing things that will make them happy? For example, I know exercising would overall raise my mood and make me happier in the long run, but I always seem to have a convenient excuse for not exercising.
Oh, that leads to another good question: Is there a difference between what makes people happy in the short term versus the long term?
I could come up with plenty more questions about happiness, but I suspect that they couldn’t be tracked by an iPhone app.
Hmmm. Looks like the TrackYourHappiness.org project was successful in making me think about happiness, after all. Sad that I won’t be able to communicate that with the researchers.
Sharon Short’s column runs Monday in Life. Send e-mail to sharonshort@sharonshort.com.
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