Are you feeling happy today? Sad? Not Sure? Who cares!A lot of folks, as it turns out. Maybe it’s the change in seasons, or Afghanistan or this endless freakin’ recession, but wherever I look people are examining the idea of happiness: what causes it, who has the most of it, why it might be overrated.The extremely busy gang at Facebook has even come up with something they are calling a Gross National Happiness Index, which uses math and stuff to determine days when words like “yay,” “happy,” and “awesome” are popular in the collective status updates of its users. Personally I’m not sure if they are measuring happiness, exactly, with words like that so much as they might be finding out how many same-sex-oriented teenagers and/ or tween girls are updating their statuses. (All together now: Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) You may not be shocked to learn that the happiest days of the year include the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Halloween. In short, peeps dig not working, stuffing their pie holes, dressing like skanky kitties and fireworks. Thanks for the insights, Facebook!Meanwhile a real live journalist is fresh on the happiness beat, too. Barbara Ehrenreich wrote one of my favorite non-fiction books of the last two decades, Nickel and Dimed, a participatory exploration of how the country screws low-income blue collar workers. Makes a great holiday gift! Her new book is called Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. She had the idea for the book when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and found herself disgusted at the grossly feminizing and infantilizing culture she encountered while seeking treatment.I like the premise of the book that the subtitle suggests but at least one review indicates that it is not a perfectly rendered treatise. Still, the work would seem to raise some important questions, some of which I have grappled with on and off for quite a while. Several years ago I wondered aloud to my then girlfriend and my dad why happiness was generally considered a superior emotion to sadness and that such a determination seems fairly arbitrary. My girlfriend — a natural optimist — considered this notion ridiculous, arguing that happy people were more productive and less of a societal strain on resources than unhappy people. She had a point. My dad — more naturally a darker soul than my girlfriend — found some merit in my question and thought it was worthy of philosophical pondering. One semi-hackneyed argument in favor of melancholia or worse is that it produces great art: Beethoven, Van Gogh, Kubrick, Joy Division, etc. ad infinitum.Anyway, I maintain that this is good and interesting stuff to think about even though it is basically impossible to resolve. Oh, and I am now married to the women who was my girlfriend back then. Most days we are pretty happy.