Just how bad was 2020? Professors find answers on Twitter By The Washington Post By Travis M. Andrews It should come as no surprise that 2020 wasn't what you'd call a happy year. We're all too aware of the list of things that went wrong, from "global pandemic" to "murder hornets." When The Washington Post asked readers to describe the year in one word, "exhausting," "lost" and "chaotic" were among the more popular adjectives. But exactly how unhappy was the year? On Twitter, it was the most miserable in at least the last 12 years, according to Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, who run the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont and use data from the site to measure our collective happiness.