The United States: A land of incredible variety.

It has always been a dream of mine to explore all 50 states in the US. Many would ask; "Why would you travel to states like North Dakota or Iowa? That must be so boring!". It might be the case, but if you never go, you never know. The beautiful thing(and sometimes something which can prove problems) about the United States is the incredible variety it provides. Meeting someone in rural Wyoming would be incredibly different than an individual living in Chicago. It is the curiosity that meeting those widespread group of locals that drives my quest to meet the locals of each region. This infographic puts a number to each congressional district of the US based on the Gallup well-being index and provides interesting insight to each location and their respective locals. The general trend shown by the map shows many urban(and the surrounding suburbs) to have the highest composite scores. When looking at the smoking category, most of statistics were concentrated in rural locations in the interior south, another interesting trend to consider. My expectation for the stress demographic would be that urban areas would show high levels, but on average the suburbs of the cities showed even higher levels of stress than the cities they surrounded.  I also found it interesting that many assume that the sometimes dreary city of Seattle is riddled with depression, but it turns out to be one of the least depressed areas on the map. This shows that many preconceived notions don't tend to hold with different areas of the United States, and further advances my curiosity of the different areas of the US(I've actually considered going to Seattle and the NW US for the future.). This map provides a whole different look at interesting demographics and presents it in a very concise manner. Each district can be clicked on to provide a raw score and percentage which further my actual understanding. If zip codes could be entered, that would be a small improvement. But the map certainly furthers my belief that America is a great land of many differences in personality of both the people and the culture of every region.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/06/weekinreview/20110306-happiness.html?ref=multimedia