Happiness Goals

People are often bad at predicting how satisfying, sustaining, and significant different decisions in life will be. This is an important problem both for public policy as well as indivual choice. Psychological research has confirmed that a few general characteristics and factors do correlate well with happiness or subjective well being. (definitions and references) These include age, health, socio-economic status, social relationships, spirituality/religion, and genetic contributions. But these are things both unsurprising on the whole and individually difficult or impossible to influence. Moreover, these general factors miss a lot: the described relationships with happiness are too simplistic. What is clear (and vague) is that everybody needs some combination of larger meaning as well as common small pleasures to achieve their own sense of happiness.

Happiness is a fluid concept and we start from different places and seek different ends. We should not plan our lives by purposely chasing happiness, but many of us misestimate how significant different decisions will be. As we go through life it would be useful to know what others have experienced before us.

We speculate that happiness could be represented in a map like that below. If you collapsed all factors and situations big and small, significant and insignificant, into three dimensions, life might look something like this. Here most people and states are dark blue and purple. But there are also several peaks which represent a high state of achievement and being. These are where people want to be, happy, however it is defined, whatever that is.

We of 33dsoul.com believe that a survey misses much that is important to a person's experience of life, but that survey data can still be informative. We aren't trying to understand what happiness is per se. We don't want to add to the scholarly library of literature on the subject, or find new causal relationships or general properties. What we do want to do is produce a useful way to simultaneously compare and visualize many of the components making up an individual's life and also to compare that individual to other people. In other words, we want to find out what this small landscape of happiness looks like. Our long term goal is to map this landscape and find where people are on it, and more importantly to give users a way to interact with the data.