How Happy You Are || Motivation

You are happy

Sometime before I was happy, on the weekend of June 9, 2001, I moved out of my home and my first marriage, and then my laptop stopped working. This is a problem for a writer.

He had spent most of the vacation scrubbing the cabinets in a rental house, fixing a crack in the ceiling, painting the living room. My parents drove into town to help me during the transfer, to try to understand what was happening or to be sad with me. Whatever the reason, they were there.

"Okay," I said to them. "I'm fine."

My father had been a handyman, but the strokes took most of that knowledge and got him somewhere behind the walls of aphasia. So when I moved into that rental house to start a yearlong separation, he was a parent who wanted to help and knew how to help but couldn't articulate help. He sat in the chair while I glued the ceiling.

"Push him!" he said as he spread the mud off the drywall.

"What do you mean?" Said.

"Miguel!" he said, shaking his head. "Push him!"

"Dad!" Said. "I don't know what you're saying!"

We finished work and went to the hardware store to buy a herbicide, then we made some hamburgers to celebrate America. The night before I went back to work, when I took out my laptop to check in, it didn't turn on. No response. I plugged it in and the screen was still black. Then it happened.

I sobbed. I cursed the woman who would become my ex. I cursed the paint, the heat and the work. I cursed for being broke.

There was none of this. Somewhere inside, I knew that a broken computer was nothing compared to what was happening in my father's brain. And I also knew that my ex was going through the same pain or worse.

The reason for my adjustment was not the computer, of course. He just wasn't happy, in the way the ice just isn't hot.

Was not well

I saw a therapist for a few months after that. After listening to me speak for a couple of visits, he suggested that I am happier when I do more for others than myself. "Do more of that," he said. I started cutting my neighbor's yard. I played soccer with my other neighbor's children. I drove five hours to help a friend plant bushes outside his new home. And for the next year, I came out of the background.

Seven years later, I live in another city. I am remarried, terribly, and in love in degrees that I didn't know was possible. I have been successful at work; I created a fledgling freelance business and left it alone when a job appeared that I couldn't refuse. We own a small brick house in a neighborhood with huge oak trees that shade the world, and on warm nights we sit and watch our fun stray dog, Gizmo, chase squirrels through the trees. If my laptop died now, I would laugh.

Last year he tested the durability of that joy. My father, the star of our family, died in early 2019. Three months later, we scattered his ashes in the Chesapeake Bay, where he was captain of a charter boat. And soon after, Laura and I came home and renovated the kitchen and added a bathroom. Men with muddy feet walked through our house for nine months, and a port-a-jon was a permanent ornament to the patio.

Before 2019 came out, I'd be 40, Laura and I accepted unexpected job offers, and a publisher signed me up for a book contract.

Oh, and we found out that we would have a baby.

Because it's apparently not enough, by the end of the year, this magazine came along with another fun game. I have contributed to these pages for several years, and during that time, they have become accustomed to appearing without notice during busy seasons. Once, they asked me to keep track of the people I spend the most time with and to assess whether they were improving me. I did, I wrote about it, and it didn't cause any fighting. Again, the editors sent an email with an assignment while on the road to ask Laura if she would like to get married. I said yes to work, and the next day she said yes.

The experiment this time: Track my subjective well-being. In fancy terms, track my "cognitive and affectation evaluations" of my life. In straightforward terms, it tracks my happiness. Not only for the day, except for the hour. i'd use a month-long expertise sampling technique to trace my positive and negative emotions throughout day by day, so every night I questioned however happy i'm with life.

In my state of affairs, I finally feel pretty smart here, guys! it's dangerous. The experiment may in theory result in disaster. Hi Mike, you're wholly committed to the current period of time. Committed to Laura. Committed to a replacement job, with the book. Committed to a replacement baby. however area unit you ... happy?

My mind skipped four weeks to succeeding obvious question. What if i'm not? i'd prefer to apprehend that?

Ed Denier has helped innumerable folks through similar experiments over the years. he's a distinguished graduate prof of scientific discipline at the University of Illinois. He has co-edited 3 books on subjective well-being. within the Eighties, he came up with the three-part model for mensuration subjective well-being: life satisfaction, positive have an effect on, and negative have an effect on.

He is a sort of happiness teacher.

One of Denier's most revealing studies was one he did on himself.

"I ne'er complete that my unhealthy mood was within the morning," he told Pine Tree State. "I conjointly saw higher moods over the weekend, that stunned Pine Tree State as a result of i like my job."

Once, a outstanding morning chat show gave Denier the task of involving a bunch of individuals, as well as some TV personalities and support employees, in a very studio.

The results barrel the producers most that they ne'er ran the show.

"When I saw the mood profiles of a partner, his unhappiness once he was along with his mate simply jumped," he wrote in AN email. "Another factor that became clear was that the mood (of the program staff) was quite high over the weekend and extremely went downhill on weekday and therefore the week. Since the tenor of the program was terribly upbeat and optimistic, it had been shocking however depressed they were after they were at work. "

When I told Diner regarding my schoolwork, i discussed that my mate and that i would have a baby.

"I hope that the birth of a baby will be positive," Denier replied. "Embower vocal poss SE surrender con Los romeos com nos."

It was known that the professor of happiness had a sense of humor.

There are several ways to validate your subjective be-be. You can use an application through the institution on Denier trackball, Cliometrics. The fare or ping em see telephone at various times of the day so that you can record your positive and negative emotions at that time.

Use a fairly basic plan and phone alerts. I started or experimented on the 4th of February, December 4, and ended on the day of the new year, exactly four weeks after. I list all the hours of a day when I generally agree, starting at 6 a.m. e finishing at 11pm Na horizontal, say at each block a time: 7am. s 7 DA manhunt e as sim per diamante.

No vertical trillion, cries quarto Salinas for every day. The upper level was for positive emotions, the second was for negative emotions, the next was a description of what was happening at that time, and in the fourth, were categories for each activity.

Every hour, we added a positive and negative point, not an interval from 0 to 3. Therefore, an exceptional hour decreased by 3 not positive and 0 not negative. A terrifying hour would be 0-3. In some quarters, it is positive and negative: I am feeling self-optimistic in a corona for or work, but I am a prisoner not in transit or something like that, I would register 1 point for positive and 1 for negative. Not the end of the day, I counted every line. ISO owed me a measure.

A second measure is also the end of each day. I simply endorsed how I felt about life in general on a scale of 0 to 7.

I am not sure what to expect, but it is two studies that are worth more. Some obvious trends have emerged. The numbers show you how you are living and how you are sitting, or that you are providing information so that you plan to continue living.

It takes you four weeks, you have been positive for 677 and you have been negative for 272. It is clear that this is the first thing that costarring DE compartmental com vocal

.Telling you my overall score first is the equivalent of posting an Instagram shot at sunset with a caption straight from one of those wall sayings. “Live In The Moment,” and you, too, can have a positive score that’s three times your negative score.

Those numbers don’t give the whole picture, though. At the end of each day, in the “How satisfied are you?” column, where I could pick a number between 0 and 7, the numbers add up to 119, for an average of 4.25. That’s barely halfway satisfied, and I was on a holiday vacation for most of it.

But… I’m so happy! Look at that other score!

The way I figure it, if you Live In The Moment like I do, you probably lie to yourself in a few of them. When my phone buzzed to remind me to record my score, it was as if I was being evaluated in front of a live audience of one. 

In the absence of a more reasonable response (what if most hours exist in a state that’s neither positive or negative?) a person will err toward the positive in the moment, then give a more honest assessment at the end of the day. 

The interesting part comes when you look deeper at the numbers and find the trends. Where and when are the spikes? 

* * *

One of my favorite simple lines in any song is by a Texas songwriter named Ryan Birmingham, who in “Dylan’s Hard Rain” has a line that goes, “Everything stays the same, if you don’t change it.”

I’ve listened to that lyric for about a decade, and it’s come to mean different things to me at different points in life. I sang it when I pulled out of that rental house and moved to another city. I sang it when I was sick of work or home. 

Our lives are like car engines, with some parts running fine and others that could use a little tuning. In 2017, I left my job as the editor of a magazine to freelance and spend time with my dad in his final years. I was decidedly happier for having done that. I got to make up my own schedule and travel on assignments. And I was there with him through his final breath, something I’ll never regret.

A couple of weeks later the owner of a local digital media company in my city, Charlotte, North Carolina, called and offered a contract to write for them. I took it, wrote one story, and then he offered me a full-time job to build a journalism outfit there. My first day was the Tuesday after Labor Day. It’s an exciting place to work. For the first time in my career, I’m at an outlet that’s growing and expanding. It’s fun.

Point is, I figured my work would get high marks.

But the spreadsheet says otherwise. The work hours are, at best, even. But the most consistently negative time in my life, according to the spreadsheet, are the hours immediately after one of my stories publishes.

I give high marks for every reporting trip (exploring!) and most of the writing time (thinking!), but the feedback hours make me queasy.

The biggest difference now that I’m back at a local publication is that the responses are personal. The people who send nasty emails and social media posts sometimes turn out to be your neighbors. Each person who engages with a piece of writing brings his or her own experiences to my work, and those experiences could lead them to love or hate it, and me. Which is fine until you run into them at the supermarket.

The other 2s and 3s on the negative side were rare, but intense. And for many couples, they’re as common in December as the cold. 

I know it’s inevitable, but it crushes me to argue with Laura. We had one on Christmas Eve, which had the lowest score of any day, 13-23. My mother was in town for the first Christmas without Dad. My brother has a new girlfriend who was flying out to see family. We still had a few last-minute gifts to pick up. Dinner was at 5; church at 8. Laura’s pregnant. I was finishing up a story. The angst and tension built quietly, until we were standing in our new bathroom, stressed and arguing over how to get it all done.

She left to run her errands. I left to run mine, and the next few hours were all negative 3s. 

I recently read a story in the LA Times Review of Books that claimed 2019 was “quite a year for yelling.” The author discusses how several big movie scenes from the year hinged on passionate arguments. The biggest one was the scene in A Marriage Story, where Adam Driver and Scarlet Johann-sen, who are married in the film, shout for several minutes. Critics of all shades have shoveled praise on the scene. 

There’s also a terrific song from Keisha that includes Liturgist Simpson and Brian Wilson—it’s quite a trio—with the most devastating main line. “I don’t hate you, babe. It’s worse than that.”

I wonder why these pieces of pop culture are landing so firmly in American lives now. What’s going on with us? Are breakups having a moment? Are we embracing unhappiness? I sure hope not.

At least in this house, we’re not. Laura and I got right that afternoon. We talked. We listened. If I hadn’t been keeping a spreadsheet, I likely would have forgotten about it by now. But it’s good that I haven’t. It’s the worst feeling of the month, and it’s helpful to see data to support that. 

The day after Christmas, I turned 40.

This makes me a lot older than other first-time dads. For someone who spent a good bit of the past eight years helping to take care of his ailing father, I’m worried about that. You never want to look into the future and see yourself as an old man and a burden. 

Laura and I drove to Charleston, South Carolina, that day, a short three-hour trip from our house. She’d booked a room at an artsy hotel, and for two days we walked and napped, walked and napped. 

I did a lot of thinking, too. I missed my dad, and as we wandered into places and people looked down at her belly then looked away, we talked about our son and who he might be. The sadness of a first holiday season without a father and the excitement of a future with a son simply co-existed, but the good won out.

The score on the four days we were out of town was 115-5. The only negative emotions stemmed from anxiety over being on vacation and feeling like I should be working.

Not surprisingly, then, over the course of the four-week experiment, weekends also got high marks. So did workouts, like my long runs alone. And hanging Christmas lights on a sunny Sunday. Those were all 3s on the good side. 

A thing about this experiment you should know: If you do it, don’t tell anyone. A few times when Laura and I were walking around Charleston, she checked in.

“How are your points?” she’d say.

“Oh, you just want to have a good score,” I said, and she laughed.

“Well yeah,” she said. “Of course I do!”

The last days of the experiment were over New Year’s. You read lots of assessments of the past year around then. People painfully share how bad their year was, or how much they accomplished. Most of the assessments reveal more about the person’s outlook on life than real data.

On New Year’s Day, a friend had a small 50th birthday party at a dive bar. About a dozen of us showed up. The air was warm, so we sat on the back patio while his dog sniffed the fence line. The beer of choice for the group was National Bohemian.

Natty Ooh is, if you have the right perspective, a bad beer that can be fantastic. It’s from Baltimore and carries a lot of the personality of that city. It can taste a little rusty on the first sip, but if you embrace it you can delight in its toughness.

On the back of the cans is a saying, “Live Pleasantly,” and it made me smile. I gave it a 3.

There’s a part of me that’s happy to report how I rallied toward the end of this experiment, that I’m on a run of sky-high scores. I’m happy to tell you that most of the things that should make a person happy—family and vacations and time together—do. But maybe tracking subjective well-being is more about the learning process than the final grade.

As I write this, my numbers are trending upward. Maybe it’ll keep going that way. 

If not? Then maybe I’ll do something about it. Because everything stays the same if you don’t change it.