(Un)Happiness Meter

The basic idea is to develop a means of tracking your relative happiness at every given moment. This could be a notebook and a well defined 1 to 10 scale. Or it could be a super complex computer program that you input stuff into until the end of time and calculates all sorts of neat things.

I imagine the high end version would spend its time calculating a base line for you so that you could see where you're going from the base line. And potentially it could work on trying to come up with ways of comparing that happiness to other places as well. Either other people, or other times in your life. It could even help you look at what it is that is making you happy or what happiness looks like for you. If that makes any sense at all. I guess I mean that maybe if we could see when we're happy, whatever system we're using to discover that should also reveal through its process how it is we're considering ourselves happy, not just under what conditions, but how the definition of happiness works for us.

The low cost m0del of this would really be all about you figuring out how you want to rate and define happiness. Maybe under your model you rate your happiness on a 1 to 10 scale this year, but next year your scale goes from 10 to 20 because your ability to be happy in the following year has just skyrocketed, such that your happiness level really can't drop back down to the below 10 level. You know, maybe you had a kid, or got married, or accomplished a big life goal, so you have developed this unrelenting happiness about something.

It's something to hold is all.