poked through a crack. A few perfect white clouds pottered across a
French blue sky. Let Big Brother, toiling away in some windowless
university lab, eat that for lunch. After many months and
interactions with this app, I almost always got pinged when I was
indoors and working, which didn’t seem very helpful to either the
Mappiness project or to my own. (And it didn’t seem fair, because I
was outside fairly often, wasn’t I?) Mappiness is in the midst of a
multiyear big-data grab, asking tens of thousands of volunteers to
record their moods and activities twice a day at random times. Then it
matches those responses to an exact GPS location from which it
extracts information on the weather, amount of daylight and other
environmental characteristics. The aim is simple: What makes people
happy? Does place matter, or not so much?
Big Brother—or Big Scientist, really—is George MacKerron, a
young and congenial economist at the University of Sussex. As he
explained it to me, much of the happiness data out there involves
relationships, activities and economic behaviors, and much of it is
familiar: people are happiest when they are well enmeshed in
community and friendships, have their basic survival needs met, and
keep their minds stimulated and engaged, often in the service of some
sort of cause larger than themselves. But MacKerron wondered about
the people who already have these things going for them, or, for that
matter, about the people who don’t; are there other factors that could
make meaningful differences in the march of their days?
To find out, he launched Mappiness in 2010 and within a year had
gathered 20,000 participants and over a million data points (by the
time I joined a few years later, he was up to 3 million). Here’s what
the data shows: People are least happy at work or while sick in bed,
and most happy when they’re with friends or lovers. Their moods
often reflect the weather (most live in the UK, so that’s not
surprising). But one of the biggest variables, the surprising one, is not
who you’re with or what you’re doing (at least for this iPhone-using