2021: A Year in Happiness

While we all strive for it, happiness is a hard thing to achieve. This was especially true for 2020 which according to the Hedonometer was the saddest year on record. Living these sad thoughts aside, how did general happiness look like across the years? To visualize that, we’ve compiled and normalized 12 years’ worth of Hedonometer data and put everything together as a calendar to allow you to reflect on each of the days in 2021.

You might say that your individual happiness looks very different from this norm. This is why we encourage you to assess your own happiness on top of the data by ranking each day from 1 to 10.

By connecting these dots, we hope you will become a bit more mindful of your happiness as well as discover if, how, when and why it is different from the norm. 

The Hedonometer Research

Researchers at the University of Vermont developed the Hedonometer, an instrument that measures daily Twitter sentiment by tracking aggregate usage of 10,000 common positive and negative words in the English language.

How we compiled the data?

Five is a neutral score on the Hedonometer scale, with any number higher reflecting that Twitter users were happy on a given day, and anything lower showing that Twitter users were upset. Six is around where it settles most days. In order to better show daily variations, we’ve decided to normalize the data on a 1 to 10 scale, where 1 represents the saddest day in the dataset (31st May 2020), and 10 represents the happiest day in the dataset (25th December 2008).

Data source: hedonometer.org (1st December 2020)