This is the frequency of the “happy” and “happiness” keywords on Tumblr, from Tumblr’s trends interface. Interestingly, there are significant peaks on March 17 and April 1. Let’s hopscotch over the methodological errors and assume that this means people, or at least people on Tumblr, are actually significantly happier on those days. What does that mean?
Well, as far as I can tell, the most significant thing about those days is that they’re St. Patrick’s Day and April Fool’s Day, respectively. If you compare with Google trends, there are also peaks at these days, but they are local peaks, they’re not as significant as on Tumblr, and they are overtaken by larger peaks on other days. I think happy people are more likely to write blog posts with “happy” as a keyword than they are to google “happy” — after all, they shouldn’t have to, when they’re already happy, but they might very well want to share that with their blog readers — so let’s ignore that inconvenient nugget. With overconfidence to match the silliness of this whole exercise, what can we conclude? Well, it appears that to make the world a happier place, we need more informal holidays. Nothing like a day of drinking or pulling pranks on your friends to lift the global mood, at least among tumblrs.
Before making that proposition to your favorite politician, though, consider this: isn’t it true that too many holidays would diminish their value? If you have ten days a year dedicated to having fun, chances are you will. But if every other day was a Fun Day, then — even without considering the practical consequences of spending that much time on hedonistic pursuits — you’d just end up sweating it and overlaboring and getting bored, not having fun at all.
Clearly, as our
anecdotal evidencescientifically valid trend data suggest, there’s a causal arrow Informal Holiday → Happiness. But what’s the optimal number and spacing of informal holidays?
(I almost didn’t reblog this because it was so long I started to become unhappy.)
