<story><title>Hedonometer</title><url>https://hedonometer.org/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>furyofantares</author><text>I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming social media and news media?&lt;p&gt;I find myself often wondering: is the whole world anxious and confused and sad right now? Or maybe just my country? Or maybe just highly-online folks? Or maybe just my bubble?&lt;p&gt;Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression.  But I don’t know how to calibrate at all, I have infinite information available to me and no way to sift through it, and the global marketplace of information seems to mean that anything that attracts attention is either highly biased or a statistical outlier or is otherwise just taking advantage of some human bias that makes it sensational enough to attract eyeballs and spread.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derefr</author><text>&amp;gt; conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression&lt;p&gt;These are mostly orthogonal, no matter the scale. &amp;quot;Fear and anger and depression&amp;quot; are much more personality traits determined by genetics and raising, than they are reflections of how pleasant or unpleasant one&amp;#x27;s life is lately.&lt;p&gt;Due to hedonic adaptation (a.k.a. the &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Hedonic_treadmill#Happiness_set_point&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Hedonic_treadmill#Happiness_se...&lt;/a&gt;), people mostly act how they act no matter what their environment is currently like. Short, sharp changes (like Christmas, as seen on the Hedonometer site) can make large numbers of people temporarily feel something strongly enough to show up statistically; but long-term environmental states (e.g. recessions, famines, wars) do not cause long-term statistical shifts in reporting on emotional scales. People get used to things, and revert to their emotional set-points.&lt;p&gt;In other words, a great world and a horrible world would be indistinguishable when viewed through the lens of &amp;quot;how happy people are.&amp;quot; You can&amp;#x27;t get global utility from global happiness.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hedonometer</title><url>https://hedonometer.org/index.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>furyofantares</author><text>I’ve found myself really wanting this, but for the impossible-to-gather complement of the data — how are people doing when they aren’t consuming social media and news media?&lt;p&gt;I find myself often wondering: is the whole world anxious and confused and sad right now? Or maybe just my country? Or maybe just highly-online folks? Or maybe just my bubble?&lt;p&gt;Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression.  But I don’t know how to calibrate at all, I have infinite information available to me and no way to sift through it, and the global marketplace of information seems to mean that anything that attracts attention is either highly biased or a statistical outlier or is otherwise just taking advantage of some human bias that makes it sensational enough to attract eyeballs and spread.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noxToken</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Because as far as I can tell, conditions in the world are better than ever before but I have all these signals telling me that I’m totally wrong about it: I’m surrounded by fear and anger and depression.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have a hypothesis comprised of two ideas.&lt;p&gt;First, people have been encouraged more than ever to be expressive of their feeling and emotional states. That&amp;#x27;s the same reason there&amp;#x27;s a lot of self-deprecating humor with Millennials and Zoomers: it&amp;#x27;s a way to publicly cope with how you feel while also signalling to others that while everything isn&amp;#x27;t perfectly alright, let&amp;#x27;s laugh about it.&lt;p&gt;Second, people reacting to current events expresses feelings towards a particular thing. It is not necessarily an overall indicator of mood or mental health. I&amp;#x27;m happy that it&amp;#x27;s my birthday. I&amp;#x27;m upset that the other team won the championship. I&amp;#x27;m sad that  my grandmother died. Those things tend to be temporary emotions. I&amp;#x27;m personally am upset with a lot of things the current US administration does, but it does not reflect my overall status. As I&amp;#x27;ve seen explained: you can cure being alone by leaving your room and taking a stroll in a park; you can be lonely while surrounded by friends and family at your own birthday party.</text></comment>