Happiness is a tricky business.

One spends one's life chasing after the ideal, looking for it everywhere, and yet one usually only notices happiness in retrospect, when the moment has long since passed.

In order to be consciously happy, you basically have to ask yourself every waking moment: Is this happiness right now?

American researchers from the University of Vermont are now providing assistance in the specialist journal “Plos One”.

They show where happiness can be found easily, reliably, always in the same place - namely in the city park.

If you want to be absolutely sure, you should make the long journey to Indianapolis in the American state of Indiana. According to the ranking of biologists and data analysts, the green spaces there donate the most “happiness”.

Johanna Kuroczik

Editor in the "Science" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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The fact that trees, meadows and lakes are beneficial to our well-being is of course nothing new, as Goethe already knew (“How wonderfully nature shines for me!”).

The phenomenon is called biophilia, the love of life, this human tendency towards forests and meadows.

Studies have also shown the healing effects of local green spaces, even in the UK Parliament, "Green Space and Health" was debated in 2016.

Residents with a park nearby were more active and less likely to suffer from diabetes and heart disease, according to the report.

According to a Dutch study, those who lived further away from urban green areas were more likely to suffer from anxiety disorders and depression.

And a 2019 analysis in Scientific Reports showed that spending at least two hours a week in parks or forests boosts mood.

The American researchers have now further differentiated which parks make people happier than others.

Incidentally, New York with its famous Central Park only came in sixth.

The parks in Austin and Los Angeles occupied the top spots in addition to the leader mentioned at the beginning.

Now, that information is of little use to us in this country, but the lessons of the study are that the funding of the park, ie how much money is spent on maintenance, had little effect on the amount of additional happiness that came from visiting the park.

But the size is: People were happiest in parks with more than 40 hectares, which would be more than 50 soccer fields.

After that came small neighborhood parks.

The question remains, which is both technical and philosophical: How do you measure happiness?

In 2022 the answer is obvious – with the help of social media, of course.

For their study, the researchers checked more than 1.5 million posts on Twitter to see how often they contained words with happy connotations, including "beautiful" or "perfect", and assigned them to the place where the user posted the post on their smartphone had typed.

The tweets were happier between trees and flower beds than outside of parks.

Incidentally, the tweets of the traditionally happiest days on Twitter, Christmas and New Year's Day, were chosen as a benchmark for happiness.

When you read the study, you stop at this point – New Year?!

The charm of Christmas can still be traced somewhere (gifts, roast goose).

However, the first of January is traditionally clouded by a champagne hangover, good but completely unattainable resolutions and the bleak prospect of becoming a year older again, but not a bit wiser.

Whatever happiness is, New Year's Day may be impossible.

Goethe saw it in a similar way: "A new year appears, so I have to pay my duty, reverence bids me write poetry here from a pure heart, but as bad as it is, it is meant well."