is how little related it is to work. Take this nifty bit of data-crunching, derived from Facebook status updates. As Noam Cohen notes in his New York Times report on the project, "There is a 9.7 percent increase in happiness on Fridays compared with the worst day of the week, Monday." The peaks are all days off work, too: Thanksgiving, Christmas, July 4th, Halloween etc..
It's no surprise, certainly. And a weekend break brings pleasurable novelty even to people with most rewarding careers. But it's sad to think that the thing that most of us spend the most of our time doing brings us so little relative satisfaction.
It may be that Facebook's Gross National Happiness Index is missing the many deep satisfactions of work and captures only emotional highs that we wouldn't want to experience every day. But I'm not convinced that's the case. Instead I think it suggests a problem with our relation to work and why we choose to do the work we do.
Creator of the index, Adam Kramer of the University of Oregon, sums it up nicely: “If we know money doesn’t buy happiness,” he suggests to Cohen, “why are we optimizing for money?”