Activities For Best Moments

Every moment is precious. Everyone knows this but unfortunately not everyone follows it. 

What Max taught me to go back to the basics - roots of our evolution (thanks to evolutionary biology). What matters in life is more or less captured brilliantly in our evolutionary roots. One doesn't need magic, religion or psychedelics or definitely no need ponder about "meaning of life". 

In other words - Biophilia wins always. 

Big data is also telling us the same (ignore the word happiness and just call it fulfilling moments)

The most important happiness study, in my opinion, is the Mappiness project, founded by the British economists Susana Mourato and George MacKerron. The researchers pinged tens of thousands of people on their smartphones and asked them simple questions: Who are they with? What are they doing? How happy are they?

From this, they built a sample of more than three million data points, orders of magnitude more than previous studies on happiness. 

So what do three million happiness data points tell us?

The activities that make people happiest include sex, exercise and gardening. People get a big happiness boost from being with a romantic partner or friends but not from other people, like colleagues, children or acquaintances. Weather plays only a small role in happiness, except that people get a hearty mood boost on extraordinary days, such as those above 75 degrees and sunny. People are consistently happier when they are out in nature, particularly near a body of water, particularly when the scenery is beautiful.

The findings on the data of happiness are, to be honest, obvious. When I told my friends about these studies, the most common response was, “Did we need scientists to tell us this?”

But I would argue that there is profundity in the obviousness of the data on happiness.

Sometimes, big data reveals a shocking secret. At other times, big data tells us that there is no secret. And that’s the case with happiness.

This is crucial to keep in mind for the many of us who are not doing the obvious things that make people happy. We are falling for traps that the data says are unlikely to make us happy.