Time: The Pursuit of Happiness (Part II)

English: Data from April 2011 Editor Survey that lists Social Media activities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last week, I introduced Time's feature on happiness, and talked about the article that made up Part I.

Part II: Tell Us What Makes You Happy 

This was an infographic of survey results; online, you're encourage to take the survey first and compare your answers to those overall.  So I shall!

The results are pretty much what you might expect (I only fell into the majority occasionally), but here's something I found really interesting:

23% of people report having felt worse after looking at other people's Facebook pages or other social media profiles. That's a minority, but a pretty big one.

Why? There's no majority answer to that question, but the plurality (30%) say it's because of felling worse in comparison to others.  So far, not really shocking.

76% of people say they believe other people make their lives look better than they are on Facebook etc.

But 78% report that their own profiles reflect their lives as they really are.

Something about that doesn't line up.  I can't quite put my finger on it; the closest I'm coming up with is "Everyone's life sucks as much as mine, but I'm the only one who tells the truth about it, but their lies are cooler than my truth so I still feel bad."  But that... let's call it irrational.

I don't know.  Check out the survey and let me know what you think.  More next week!

Related articles

• Time Magazine: The Pursuit of Happiness (Part I)