When there’s a pile of laundry in one room and a pile of bills in the next, a person might be tempted to question the possibility of true happiness.
Is happiness a warm puppy, as Peanuts creator Charles M. Schultz suggested nearly 50 years ago? Then what about the spot the puppy left on the rug?
This subject has been on my mind these past few weeks in the wake of a report that came out of the University of Vermont naming Idaho Falls as the second happiest city in the United States, behind Napa, Calif., and ahead of such places as Santa Cruz, Boulder, Colo., and Ashville, N.C.
For a place nobody seems to know much about, Idaho Falls seems to show up a lot in stories rating places as “most liveable,” “most affordable,” “most family friendly,” etc.
But Napa, Boulder, Ashville and Santa Cruz are happening places, and Idaho Falls is a place where people routinely named “home” as the hottest nightspot in a “Best of . . .” poll that used to take be taken.
There’s a twist on this latest piece of news, though. It’s not based on traditional surveying methods, but on social media. Our happiness is the result of a study entitled “The Geography of Happiness: Connecting Twitter sentiment and expression, demographics, and objective characteristics of place.”
Five researchers plotted over 10 million geotagged tweets from 2011, looking for happy words. “With a score of 6.25, we found the happiest city to be Napa, Calif., due to a relative abundance of such happy words as ‘restaurant’, ‘wine’, and even ‘cheers’, along with a lack of profanity,” he wrote. “At the other end of the spectrum, we found the saddest city to be Beaumont, Texas, with a score of 5.82. In general, cities in the south tended to be less happy than those in the north, with a major contributing factor being the relative abundance of profanity used in those cities.”
Idaho Falls posted a score of 6.21. In our case, happy words and expressions included: “lol” (which everybody seems to use a lot), “excellent,” “love,” “opportunity” and “friends,” “sweet,” “super” and “happy.” Only one of the seven words you can’t say on television showed up on the list. Are we as squeaky-clean as we perceive ourselves to be?
This column is being written in early March for the May-June issue of Idaho Falls Magazine. As I took my new dachshund puppy, Klaus, outside this morning in my haphazard effort to house-train him, the thought of June seemed like a faint promise. Daylight Savings Time started this weekend, so the seasons are marching forward. I won’t say it can’t come fast enough, because as I get older everything seems to go by faster and I wish it would slow down. I felt sorry to see summer end last year, and I expect to feel the same way this year, perhaps a touch more.
There’s plenty in this world to worry about, and we live in a society that thrives on keeping us wound up. When the clock radio comes on in the morning, the news is nothing that makes me want to lie in bed and relax.
What’s going to happen to my job? What about my retirement? And why isn’t my Barry Bonds rookie card from 1987 worth the fortune I thought it would be?
In juxtaposition to this, here’s a question first asked nearly 2,000 years ago by an itinerant preacher in a backwards part of the world: “Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?”
That’s right. What would Jesus tweet?