Want to know how people are feeling? Don't ask them. Instead, watch what they do when they think nobody is watching.
People lie. A lot. We lie to ourselves and to others. We lie when people ask us how we're feeling. We lie when we take surveys. We lie when we give feedback. It's not that we're bad or evil — we have a strong innate bias towards presenting ourselves in the most positive light possible, and this means that we have trouble portraying ourselves accurately.
In the ancestral environment — small egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribes — the people we spent time with knew us extremely well. They knew our foibles and missteps, and they stuck with us anyway. Nobody could get away with much lying or distortion — we'd be called out immediately. Our lives are very different today. Our relationships are shallower, more fragmentary. We're not rooted to much. So in our public personas, we project whatever signs and symbols and scripts we can, in order to be seen positively, in order to fill the gaping void that should rightfully be filled with deep unconditional human love and acceptance and closeness. Ironically, the stroking that we get from adopting others' signs and symbols and scripts has the opposite effect than we intend — it leaves us hollow and disconnected, like addicts reliant on our next fix.
We know that people get depressed by spending time on social media — they are looking at people's best attempts at social desirability, and comparing others' rose-tinted tales to their own cracked and pitted lives. It's hard to stop participating in this game. We're just not wired to do radical honesty very well — we care too much about what others think of us. People happily jump into #100daysofgratitude challenges, but what about #100daysofhonesty? Do you dare? Do you dare reveal how ugly, hungry and dizzy you feel? Do you dare speak of the fatigue that you fight silently day after day? Facebook may lie, but Google autocomplete never does.
It's time to close the happiness gap. It may feel difficult at first, but our long-term sanity depends upon it.