And now for some more palaver from your Cheerful Curmudgeon. And remember that curmudgeonhood, by definition, means, among many other things, being habitually late to the figurative party.
So you'll forgive the Cheerful C. if he's only recently learned about the Gross National Happiness Index that Facebook has developed over the past few years. It's the index that, as the curmudgeon understands it, is the constantly developing result of computers sorting for indications of happiness or sadness through words used on Facebook posts.
The search has pinpointed individual and collective happiness by clocking repeated words. For those as resolutely and regularly behind-the-curve as the C. C., it might be helpful to mention that positive, or happy, words in posts include "happy" (duh!), "yay!" and "awesome." Words denoting the opposite include "sad" (duh again!), "doubt" and "tragic."
According to Facebook--which seems to have borrowed this idea from Bhutan King Jigme Singye Wangchuck and a gauge of his country's well-being--it becomes an easy thing to clock the nation's happiest days. By the use of a simple chart (which won't be reproduced here for reasons of technological ignorance), the happiest day by far for mood-swinging Americans is Thanksgiving, followed (if the Curmudgeon reads the chart correctly) by Christmas, Easter, Fourth of July, Valentine's Day and Halloween--all of them, by inference, combining into one sustained nation-wide "whee!"
(Note no mention of New Year's Eve,)
So here's where the Cheerful Curmudgeon has to say it's all too clear that the word-crunching computers selecting "happy" and "yay!" and "awesome" (probably most frequently plucked from the phrase "Awesome, dude!)--and drawing conclusions about their import--have obviously never been to a 12-step meeting.
If those computers had sat in support-group gatherings at certain holiday times of the year--and we're just entering the biggest--they'd know happiness is not an abundant commodity. It can be quite the opposite for people recovering on a one-day-at-a-time basis. The mere mention of, particularly, Thanksgiving and Christmas and, almost as significantly, Valentine's Day can strike fear in the hearts of those sharing in rooms with folding-chairs. Bringing up the dicey subject(s) makes blood run cold and hair stand on end.
As the Cheerful Curmudgeon understands it from having 12-step-matriculated many years back, the words "Christmas" and "Thanksgiving" instantly conjure images of family, and family--or perhaps individual family members--are the ones seen as responsible for the origins of the recovering member's problems. Deciding whether to spend holiday time with people believed to be perpetrators is hardly cause for wide smiles and the irresistible desire to put on party hats. Breaking bread with abusers around the Yule log isn't appealing to men and women unable to release resentments completely. As for Valentine's Day, the recollections of failed romances also falls short of the urge to shout "hooray!" and dance a jig.
At this point in the column at hand, there's the temptation to mention holiday suicide rates, since for so long it's been conventional wisdom that death by one's own hand spikes dramatically during the last six weeks of the years. Is that old fave flick It's a Wonderful Life behind this canard? If so, it's misleading, since, according to studies, suicides don't multiply between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve but in the early spring.
That doesn't mean, of course, that when wassail-time draws near, everything is hunky-dory. The Cheerful Curmudgeon does know one psychotherapist who reports he can expect his practice to become busier as November approaches. This is just anecdotal evidence, of course, but still.
Perhaps the explanation for the Facebook Gross National Happiness Index's gross neglect of the high anxiety associated with holidays can be traced to those computers. It seems as if the news release announcing the FGNHI stipulated that for the purposes of privacy "no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research." The task is completely left to computers, but perhaps if real people were involved, they might question the findings--some almost certainly from personal experience.
The Cheerful Curmudgeon only mentions this at length here, because denying wide-spread downbeat feelings as the year's festivities loom can be problematic. Such lack of acknowledgment can mean sufferers will only feel more removed from the general jubilation, further isolated in their despair. And that would be compounding the situation rather than helping to alleviate it by understanding, by empathizing.
As for those over-worked computers: Imagine that this column had been posted on Facebook. The word "cheerful" shows up in it several times. But although its author is basically cheerful and gets through holidays pretty much intact, the message contained isn't entirely cheerful. That's to say, computers miss irony. (So do many people.) And the inability to detect irony might even give the lie to Facebook's whole undertaking.