The Nature Fix
INTRODUCTION
I was hiking in Arches National Park when the Mappiness app on my phone pinged me. Some people would be annoyed, but not I. Finally, I was somewhere outside and beautiful and could tell the app how happy, relaxed and alert I was. Very, very and very. I told it so by tapping on the screen. Then I victoriously took a photo of the smooth,
salmon-colored cliffs in front of me. Small topographies of lichen poked through a crack.
A few perfect white clouds pottered across a
French blue sky. Let Big Brother, toiling away in some windowless university lab, eat that for lunch. After many months and 234
interactions with this app, I almost always got pinged when I was indoors and working, which didn’t seem very helpful to either the
Mappiness project or to my own. (And it didn’t seem fair, because I was outside fairly often, wasn’t I?) Happiness is in the midst of a multiyear big-data grab, asking tens of thousands of volunteers to record their moods and activities twice a day at random times.
Then it matches those responses to an exact GPS location from which it extracts information on the weather, amount of daylight and other environmental characteristics. The aim is simple: What makes people happy? Does place matter, or not so much?