The Lunch Report: The Happiest Lunch Is NOT in Louisiana

Today is clearly one of the coldest days of the year (it better be, because I can't withstand temperatures much lower than this).


Bitter cold can be a source of grave misery. It ravages the skin, stirs up the static (try walking into a meeting with hair standing on end, makes quite an impression) and serves as too easy an excuse to hit the bottle before dusk (even now when the sun sets by 5pm).


Nonetheless, I was prepared to ignore the cold today. I was going to put my nose to the grindstone and get down to the business of being happy, NYC-style, by being extraordinarily efficient, vigorously checking things off my “to do” list, immersing myself in work and indulging in all the superlatives that NYC has to offer (best shopping, best theatre selection, best gyms, etc). By the end of the day I would be incapacitated with a sense of satisfaction.


And then I opened the newspaper and logged on to the Web:* there it was, we in NY are the unhappiest folks in all the land, 51st out of 50 (they even included Puerto Rico).


And the happiest state? Louisiana. Really? At first I was defensive. Maybe if we had their climate, we’d be happy too.




Besides, people forget the many advantages of unhappiness:


+ In NY, we have free license to complain. Happy people aren't allowed to complain and will elicit no sympathy when doing so. In NY we can complain about the budget, the disproportionate effect that the financial crisis has had on our state, the weather, etc. This may be why we're never lacking for conversation in NY.


+ In NY we're more productive. Angst and depression can be tremendous sources of inspiration, both in finance and the arts. In fact, probably the only reason folks in Louisiana are happy is because of the financial tools invented by NYers, the magazine written by NYers and the clothes designed by NYers. Our productivity is subsidizing their happiness. Maybe we should be getting some sort of a tax credit for this?


And then I looked a bit closer at the criteria for the study and realized the problem with the study. In all their scientific wisdom, the scientists were measuring happiness by asking people if they were happy, a fatal flaw in the study’s design that flies right in the face of the Heisenberg Principle.*


In Louisiana, they don’t actually know what happiness is. How could they? In NY we have more psychiatrists per person and the average literacy rate is much higher.* What with the dearth of psychiatrists in LA and the comparatively low literacy rate, how could they even know if they are happy or not?


Being Southern and all, they were undoubtedly motivated by a sense of politeness in their responses. If you’re Southern, it’s better to confirm your happiness than burden a complete stranger with emotional confessions, especially when the stranger is simply trying to conduct a scientific study for which he or she has already decided the conclusion well in advance of initiating the study.


And then I really got it. The study and its results are part of an elaborate marketing campaign designed to stop the constant flow of people into NY and the potential dilution of our per capita happiness. People in NY are the happiest in America but we rely on studies such as these to ensure the secrecy of our happiness.* Similarly, people in Louisiana need polls like this to persuade them of their sense of contentment (although with the literacy rate in LA what it is, a study published in the Journal of Science may not be the most effective way to spread the message there).


Come to think of it, we're so damned happy that we turn to those sad gits in Louisiana when we need some depressing literature to bring us down a notch (Tennessee Williams comes to mind . . .).. I once had a friend who saw two Tennessee Williams plays in one day. She was so depressed I had to bring her to the ER. Thank goodness we also have some of the best medical care in the nation in New York.


Happy Holidays to everyone in America, no matter what state you inhabit.


Penelope Frost

p.s. I was so happy today that I forgot to have lunch. Cost: $0.


Notes
*The Wall Street Journal, p.1; http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20091217/sc_livescience/happieststatesrevealedbynewresearch

*The popularized version of this principle posits that the act of observing something changes the object of observation.

Another fatal flaw, the study concedes, is that the LA interviews took place before Hurricane Katrina. To be fair, though, the stunning and unexpected victories racked up by the New Orleans Saints in 2009 could very well counter much of the continued emotional effects of Katrina.

*The literacy rate in LA is 28% compared with 50% in NY. This could mean we’re either twice as happy or twice as screwed up but I’m still working on the equation and related algorithms to demonstrate this.*As it turns out, the study was financed largely by capital sourced in NY.