What does a happiness score mean? We wonders, aye, we wonders.
As a boy many years ago, when looking for excuses not to go to church, I noticed that I could pretty much give myself a stomach-ache by concentrating on sensations inside my body. Try it yourself. Do you have a shoulder that does not ache? Concentrate on the sensations from the other one (e.g. my left). Some of the sensations are neutral, few are downright pleasurable, and every now and then there's something slightly unpleasant. Study your shoulder long enough, and those unpleasant-to-painful sensations will start to dominate your attention. Presto!
I suspect that happiness is similar; excessive introspection can skew what we find.
Of course real indigestion made the self-invoked variety look silly, but one of the graces in life is that memory of agony isn't as intense as the agony itself. I've had kidney stones, which recalibrated my pain scale. Sort of. I remember how I acted with the pain, but the pain itself is long gone.
On a smaller scale, I spent most of yesterday in bed (when I actually did want to go to church) and still feel bad today, but since I don't still feel yesterday's pain I can only tell I'm doing better by noticing what I can do.
So I don't have a scale, or have only a sliding scale, to measure pain or pleasure, and since usually pain weighs higher, that pushes me in the "unhappy" direction.
In another way of thinking about it, imagine driving to meet to the family. The road is clean, traffic is smooth, the kids are happily playing roadside bingo, the car sounds fine; am I happy? Maybe not as much as when we reach the grandparents'. Nevertheless, why would I not be in the meantime? And when we reach the goal, I'll be eight or nine hours tired and not feeling 100% too--that won't make the arrival "not count" for happiness, I hope.
Some cultures deprecate complaining or standing out--part of your identity is your community. That seems to have several implications on happiness, and complications on how you measure it. If I've a tootheache but my family's celebration is going wonderfully, how do I rank that? If I'm encouraged not to talk about what's bothering me, will I tell your survey things that I don't think about?
Do you try to take an average of people in a specific situation in two different cultures, and then try to rescale the distribution of one to match the other, and then apply that re-scaling to other situations? If that makes the distributions in other cases match too, then you may have some way of measuring happiness using self-surveys, but it seems fraught with methodological and statistical mines.
I've long had a fairly melancholic disposition. In any situation I think of the problems. When I travel I try to figure a way to get back home if things go sideways. As Ogden Nash wrote of his wife I think of mine: "In your absences I glimpse fire and floods and trolls and imps." And I'm very aware of my own failings. But I don't think of myself as unhappy.
After typing those words, I noticed that the new pain in my foot is quite a bit higher than earlier this evening, now well into "sleep-interrupter" level. I wasn't expecting to do a practical test so soon. So far I still think of myself overall as pretty happy, though a bit grumpy at the moment.
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