A semi-scientific account of what makes me happy and/or what happiness makes me do, etc

I like to record what happens. It feels wrong that life goes on in all its concrete splendor, and there’s nowhere I can get an official record of what it was. It feels crazy that it might just not be knowable what happened on a particular evening in 2016. I want to be able to know, at least a bit.

Relatedly, before bed I do ‘logging’: I write down what happened in brief, my mood on a 1-9 scale, details of drugs I took, afflictions that beset me, and a few other things. Elsewhere I record how much productive stuff and work on my literal job I get done.

An upshot is that I can empirically check how my mood relates to various things, such as the mention of different words in the day.

Some things that seem to go with being happier:

• Mentioning my boyfriend (conditioned on the period we have been dating)
• Taking vitamin D
• Taking ibuprofen
• Basically doing work is better, except 1-5 poms of work is worse than none
• Antibiotics (this is the best ‘drug’ according to my records, in spite of my felt experience that it is entirely neutral - I wonder if the end to wondering if I’m about to die of a UTI and/or feeling like I’m maybe about to die of a UTI is cheering)
• Having a migraine (!) (they tend to be mild, but still)
• Having some other kind of headache (!)
• Having fewer overall afflictions (I’m an affliction snob, I only like headaches)
• Interacting with some of my friends
• The word ‘flight’. Yeah, I love airports I guess.
• The word ‘bike’. (Or I just love going places?)
• Various sexy words
• ‘Read’, ‘singing’, ‘cafe’,
• Going to Constellation (contrary to my impression)
• Mention of two different specific hated work projects
• ‘AI’ (this is very surprising, but I guess doing work makes me happy). Apparently I have not once mentioned ‘Claude’ or ‘GPT’.

Some things that don’t seem to make me especially happy, contrary to some expectations:

• antidepressant
• dextroamphetamine
• acetaminophen
• b12
• not having my period (if I had to guess, while periods are characteristically upsetting and painful, the more they are that, the more I let myself off the hook for everything else, and overall I selfishly enjoy pain and upset more than guilt and obligation. I suspect this is also what is going on with headaches on the above list.)
• therapy
• brunch

Some things that seem to go with being less happy:

• naproxen
• alcohol (I wonder if I drink more often when I’m unhappy - my internal experience of alcohol is often very positive)
• Interacting with some of my friends (even ones I think I enjoy spending time with, probably this is at least somewhat because I seek them out when unhappy, but admittedly I’m also a recluse)
• ‘alone’ (this is quite surprising to me)
• ‘party’ (this at least matches my anticipations, though I have the impression that I often like parties when I go to them)
• ‘uber’
• ‘derping’
• ‘SF’ (aka San Francisco) seems to be one of the worst things to happen, but thankfully n is quite low, so it’s also too early to say
• ‘Berkeley’ is also bad though
• ‘Dominion’ (the fun game)
• ‘Hot tub’ (a thing I claim to love, I think we need a larger sample size)