Three times a day my phone with a telling me that I have a new to take. The , from TrackYourHappiness.org, asks me a of about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how , how I was being and how happy I felt about it all. I my with a little that slides from “bad” to “good.” Though the trackers’ offer a that “correlation does not causation,” from thousands of its users published in 2010 that people are happier when they are .
After I took 100 over about a month, that’s not what my told me. I reported the most when I was eating and the when I was . I was happier at home than I was outside or anywhere else.
My biggest , though, is that much of my life of things that I don’t want to do, like laundry and with the wording of a . Being that most of my life is does not exactly spark joy.
As the weeks of -taking went by, I had another, more : that this on my was instilling a new kind of . Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary , I was thinking about the ’s toggle and where this ranked to the other moments I had .
The is just one example from an increasingly field of offering the not just to contemplate their but also to it, it, schedule it and optimize it. Every app is with offerings like the Happiness Planner, Happiness 360°, Daylio and more. Apple’s Health app has a tracker (with one of those damn toggles) built into all of its , and my Fitbit offers , with some fancy bonus if I pay to upgrade to premium status.
According to Stephen Schueller, a psychologist who runs the and health lab at the University of , Irvine, there are now thousands of these apps — so many that he to run an that reviewed their credibility, user and transparency. How-to books about boosting your in measurable ways are on best-seller . And there is no end to online and expensive that make .
The deep to these ideas and together the in Americans’ health, which many people desperate to find , and the mania for the optimized self, which in its most extreme form tech barons to spend small every second of output from all 78 of their to maximize every bio until they die.
But aren’t the same as other kinds of metrics, like steps and rate and . There is a great of on how to and that doing so makes us significantly happier. Less is the question: Could make us feel worse?
According to one study published early in the fad, “texting about to be among those with more negative (depression and ) and “may have drawn to their typically state, the potential of a downward spiral of satisfaction.”
More studies that for some, overvaluing can to excessive . My colleague Ellen Barry covered a study that showed mindfulness did not student health and, in fact, “students at highest for health problems did somewhat worse after receiving the .”
Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who helped as a of legitimate academic , says some of the field’s findings have been misapplied. “I think it’s a serious to think that what life is about is your moment-to-moment ,” he told me. “I think that’s a recipe for and anxiety.”
After Dr. Seligman of the American Psychological Association in 1998, there was an explosion of academic in and a corresponding of - commerce. But in the 1990s and 2000s, media had more of an “Eat, Pray, Love” flavor: Happiness was meant to be discovered in meditation and pleasure and by abandoning the rat . By the 2020s, the gurus sounded more like McKinsey consultants, with productivity and , the language and metrics of workplace wellness initiatives (which have almost zero real benefits for employees). It has all been self-, for sure — but now it’s , too.
If there’s little backing for the notion that these interventions help and a real that they hurt, why are Americans so eager to spend our days over our ?
A in Human Expectations
For much of Western history, the idea of — and the word for — was to . The Greek philosopher Solon believed that the concept was so unpredictable, it made only in the view of a life.
In the West, a new emerged in the 18th : that was “something that human beings are to have,” as Darrin M. McMahon, the chair of the history at Dartmouth, told me. “God us in to be happy. And if we’re not happy, then there’s something wrong with the or wrong with the way we think about it.” Mr. McMahon, the of “Happiness: A History,” said this is how we get the idea that “life, liberty and the of ” are rights endowed by man’s creator.
In earlier , Christians were to be , and on getting to the afterlife; then they were taught “that being was pleasing to God,” as Peter Stearns, a professor of history at George Mason University, wrote in an article for Harvard Business Review in 2012. And so, whereas in earlier eras some might have guilt over being too happy in this world, it possible for people to feel something new: guilt for not being happy enough.
In the 20th , the to be measurably, demonstrably happy intertwined with the modern workplace — specifically the in productivity. This reached new prominence in 1952 with a best-selling book by the Protestant Norman Vincent Peale, “The Power of Positive Thinking.”
Dr. Peale : “Formulate and stamp on your a picture of yourself as . Hold this picture . Never it to fade. Your will seek to develop this picture. Never think of yourself as ; never the reality of the .”
The critic Barbara Ehrenreich noted that Dr. Peale’s book was to executives as a productivity booster for their members. “Give this book to . It pays !” an she cited. Happiness not just an imperative but a financial one, as .
How to achieve it a matter of increasingly intense study at the end of the 20th . At the American Psychological Association, Dr. Seligman argued that his profession hadn’t done enough on “what actions to -being, to positive , to flourishing and to a just .”
The Allure of Magic Numbers
The study of grew into a mainstream powerhouse, of book , for TikTok life coaches and TED talks, and forming the intellectual of all of today’s apps. But the in the marketplace was not on flourishing and a just but rather on how can and boost their own , as in the huge franchise that to make people “10 happier.”
Suggestions that were once have been so that they now just sound — but that doesn’t mean they have . A pair of reviews by Elizabeth Dunn and Dunigan Folk, at the University of British Columbia, that there is “surprisingly little for many widely recommended strategies,” , exercise and being in .
In “Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement That Aspired to Transform America,” Daniel Horowitz wrote, “Despite or perhaps because of its popularity, virtually every finding of under contested, by both insiders and outsiders.”
Mr. Horowitz, a at Smith College, : “Controversies go the question of or . Major have been challenged, modified or abandoned.” The of precise numbers in positive has been — he called them “ formulas.”
In one -publicized episode, the professors Barbara L. Fredrickson and Marcial F. Losada announced that had revealed to them a “.” This wasn’t a metaphor; it was a precise numerical , derived , to the ideal between positive and negative emotions. If you run your own emotions the , the number you’re for is to or greater than 2.9013, the , Drs. Fredrickson and Losada said, between “” and “.”
The idea had in academia and was in a best-selling book. But to Nick Brown, a I.T. who encountered the ratio during a in positive , the idea that you could all human emotion to a number . And when he at the calculations, he they were just wrong. He and the professors Alan D. Sokal and Harris L. Friedman published a thorough in 2013. In a -up article five years later, Drs. Brown and Friedman wrote:
A moment’s will show how impossible it is to a person’s of positive emotions on this . If someone laughs at a on TV, eats an ice cream, sees their dog get run over and watches a nice , are they at a three-to-one ratio of positive to negative emotions and flourishing? And so it is with any of emotions, as who can a metric on which to draw any in a way?
It wasn’t enough. People to cite the ratio. And the questionable idea that we can achieve some standardized, actionable of our fleeting emotions is now baked into every app that asks us to our on some arbitrary scale.
For all my , I can’t deny that these apps, these books, this whole and maximizing approach to has a for many people. I wanted to better why. So I called Kevin Sandler.
Mr. Sandler, who graduated from college in 2022, and has a home base in Long Beach, N.Y. He has spent the past few years traveling , one year spent living in a and visiting all 50 states. (He flew to Alaska and Hawaii.) He has a and and a to get the most out of his young life: to see everything, to do everything.
Since 2018, Mr. Sandler has his for every 15-minute that he was . In a YouTube video that he about this , he is charmingly about how unusual his is. When people ask him why he started his , he tells them, “I want to say it was some big life moment or that made me say, ‘I’m going to start my ,’ but the short answer is that I’m crazy.”
When he started, in his year of high school, he his three times a day. He quickly that wasn’t enough data to capture the . A few months in, he figured out that 15-minute intervals gave him the most accurate picture of his life.
Mr. Sandler has an : He his location Google Maps and then the day a kind of . He has himself, he says, to remember exactly how he felt when he was, say, out to dinner with his friends. That’s a different approach from most of the trackers on the , which seek to emotions in real time. “I’d argue that when you’re in the moment, you don’t have a perception of how you feel,” he told me.
Over time he has modified the data he collects — he now his food intake, as — and . For example, he noticed that dairy makes him tired and grumpy. But Mr. Sandler said that this kind of information isn’t useful to anyone else and that few people would want to put in the time — over an hour a day, for much of it, though Google Forms has helped him the somewhat.
He is very in the , and he’s somewhat critical of it. He has to it with a paper on his self-, in which he with previous theorizing from Dr. Seligman and on it. Mr. Sandler’s takeaway: The with the biggest on his -being is being other people.
The Trap of Emotional Optimization
Mr. Sandler is in good . For all the -boosting strategies that aren’t by , one of the few things that might move the is . Dealing with other humans forces us to put up with their and chaos and and to our own.
Engaging with other people as our selves shatters the of that we have when we’re to optimize our moment-to-moment . It also goes the self-help cliché that we cannot have good we on ourselves first. But there is no that will tell you that you’re appropriately , giving you a stamp of -adjusted approval or an ideal positive ratio to allow you into the to . You just have to do it.
The youngest , who have been in a positive culture since they left the womb, may be the most deeply by the inward shift of the for . A from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education makes the that we are, as a culture, overfocusing on the “ talk and a self-help culture” that has “ many people to inward to find and vitality. Yet the self by itself is a poor for .”
Mr. Sandler told me people ask him all the time whether they should their emotions and whether it will make them happier. He said he tells them to instead on , “the of being with your life .”
The , overstuffed marketplace of optimization will never be able to the fundamentals of the human or bring a kind of to a new . There will never be easy or straightforward answers to our most profound questions of , and ranking emotions feels like a of their awesome . I do not want to spend those walks home with my daughter how they stack up a morning run or dinner with a friend or any other moment in my day that might make me feel something. The user of being cannot be graphed.
“The biggest thing that I throughout all of my ,” Mr. Sandler said, “is that isn’t the end-all that I was for.”