While perusing Facebook the other day, I found something REALLY cool. It’s called the Gross National Happiness (GNP) calculator. It uses a computer to detect positive and negative words in Facebook statuses to determine the happiness level of Facebook users in the United States.

It calculates the number of times words like great, happy, and excited are used in statuses versus words like bad, angry, and annoyed, and the difference between these values creates the GNP for the day.

As you can see in the diagram, the happiest days of the year are major holidays. Look at the major peaks. Other than holidays, we aren’t a very happy culture. I think we should change that. I am tired of reading bummed out Facebook statuses, and I’m even more tired of posting them myself. Now, every time I post I am going to think of what I am doing to our GNP!

If this topic interests you, check out Wefeelfine.org . This international site promotes a book that compares happiness among regions, genders, age groups and more by studying words used in weblogs. On the site you can see demo pages from the book. The introduction reads “This is a book about people. Blogs are just the medium.” It’s really well organized and has absolutely gorgeous graphics. [Note: I have no affiliation with these people, I just think the idea is really cool.]

Remember to save those sad & angry posts for big problems and bring up our GNP. Someone is watching.

Happy posting! 🙂