Wheat Googling #5

What makes people happy?

Hello, me again.

Last time, I was telling you about what the best evidence is for what makes a successful, happy society. Today, I think we should look at what makes people happy on an individual basis.

How do you measure individual happiness?

Well. People have basically been trying to do this for a very long time, and the problem is it’s massively subjective, probably changes quite often for each individual, and is really hard to quantify.

But that hasn’t stopped everyone having a crack at it. Having looked at a few options, I have decided to go with the World Happiness Poll again. As I told you last time, they have a lot of society-level things they measure, but they do also have some questions designed to measure people’s personal feelings. The first of these is called the Cantril Scale. Here it is:

• Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.
• The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
• On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (ladder-present)
• On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? (ladder-future)

It was designed by Hadley Cadril in 1965 as a way of letting people ‘self-anchor’, and correlates very strongly with income.

On its own, people don’t seem to think it’s that useful. But it is useful when combined with other metrics, because then you can put them side by side and basically use it to help you assign numerical values to the more subjective questions. For example, people who reported their current life as 7+, and their future expectation as 8+, usually also reported fewer sick days and more happiness when answering other questions.

Still, for my purposes it isn’t all that useful because it doesn’t tell me anything about why people place themselves where they do on the ladder.

How do you actually measure happiness?

Luckily for me, Gallup also include ten questions in their poll that are designed to measure personal emotional wellbeing. No matter how much googling I do, I can’t find anything that will tell me why they chose these particular ten questions, so I am just going to have to trust that they had good reasons.

All ten questions have yes/no answers. They split them into two categories:

Positive Experience Index Questions

• Felt well rested yesterday.
• Treated with respect all day yesterday.
• Smiled or laughed a lot yesterday.
• Learned or did something interesting yesterday.
• Experienced enjoyment during a lot of the day yesterday.

Negative Experience Index Questions

• Experienced physical pain during a lot of the day yesterday.
• Experienced worry during a lot of the day yesterday.
• Experienced sadness during a lot of the day yesterday.
• Experienced stress during a lot of the day yesterday.
• Experienced anger during a lot of the day yesterday.

In my wholly subjective opinion, this seems like a pretty solid list. It doesn’t make any assumptions about what you might find interesting or enjoyable, but it does consider both these things to be as fundamental to human wellbeing as getting enough rest. I would struggle to think of a day that I would describe as ‘high wellbeing’ on which I couldn’t tick at least four of those. Like, maybe I didn’t laugh a lot because I was working, but I enjoyed myself, found the work interesting, and was well rested enough to actually participate.

The list of negatives seems to me equally uncontroversial. It’s basically a list of the four most miserable emotions, plus physical pain. All more or less incompatible with happiness. I suppose ‘despair’ isn’t in there, or ‘hopelessness’, but I suspect someone who felt despairing or hopeless would probably also be experiencing some of the others.

So I am going to use this list as my basis, and figure out how to build the positives and mitigate the negatives.

What shall I do?

When it comes to the game I’m writing, I can basically split the things on this list into two categories: ‘kind of dealt with’, and ‘too big to go into today’.

Kind of dealt with

• Sleep. I went to really quite extensive lengths to deal with this in my second letter to you.
• ‘Treated with respect’. I think this one makes more sense to treat as a result of lots of other changes rather than one thing I can implement. If you live in a weak hierarchy, in a culture that demonstrably cares about your wellbeing, and you can leave if your boss/lover/family is horrible to you, I think you’ve made a good start here.

Too big to go into today

• Having a good time (this covers three of the questions!) will need a whole letter about leisure time.
• Pain, and healthcare aboard ship generally, is definitely getting its own letter.

But there is one thing I can address now while still keeping this letter short enough that you should be able to get through it in under one cup of tea.

Therapy

Yeah. They’re going to need it. They’re all going to have experienced the trauma of battle, and most of them will have lost loved ones to violent death. A lot of them are also going to have problems with chronic pain because of the injuries they’ve sustained. And they’re all going to know that their job could get them killed at any time.

So I’m creating a new seat at the wardroom table: alienist. It was one of the words people used for roughly what we would now think of as a psychiatrist, but I love it for my world because the magic (and therefore the focus of government) is influenced by the emotions of cohesive communities. A person who is alienated, even alienated from themself, might be actually dangerous. I am really enjoying the implications it creates about the purpose and direction of therapy in this world.

The bread room

But where will I put my alienist’s consulting room? A ship was famously a place with absolutely no aural privacy. Well, I’ve come up with an answer. It’s a bit bananas, but it’s literally the only place I can think of. The bread room! Ships of this era had one large, waterproof tin room located low down in the ship, so they could keep the bread dry. I’m going to put a consulting room in the middle of mine. The bread, and the physical distance from all other parts of the ship, will act as a natural sound insulator! It will be devoid of natural light, but hopefully that will make the experience more intimate rather than claustrophobic.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

Grace xx

PS: What do you think of the questions GALLUP came up with? What do you think should be added/omitted?

Next time

I want to think about the sickbay, and how I can use it to relieve pain, stress, and anxiety.

This week’s interesting link

State of the World’s Emotional Health 2025

Some really interesting tidbits from their results, sometimes looking at them in conjunction with the Global Peace Index.

Right now, the project for which I am doing most of my wheat googling is a choose your own adventure IF game I’ve been commissioned to write for Choice of Games. You can find out all about it, and play the 60K word demo, here.