Happiness really may be a warm puppy
If you follow the news, you could probably tick off a dozen reasons people aren’t very happy these days: war, child poverty, impending environmental apocalypse, uppity AI — that’s just a start. Yet despite all this grim news, experts who study happiness have discovered that people are happier than we might expect. The 2024 Gallup Global Emotions Report found that, worldwide, people are happier now than they’ve been since the pandemic began, with positive emotions reaching a score of 71 out of 100, and negative emotions dropping for the first time since 2014. And in another surprising finding, people between 15 and 29 are happier than any other group.
There’s a catch, though, or at least an interesting and perhaps instructive detail. The happiest people aren’t where you might expect them to be. One way Gallup tracks happiness is by something called the “Positive Experiences Index.” This includes questions such as, “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?” “Did you experience enjoyment during a lot of the day yesterday?” and “Did you smile and laugh a lot yesterday?” When happiness is judged by these measures, not one economically advanced nation makes the top ten. The happiest people in the world, it turns out, live in South America, Mexico, and Southeast Asia. With an 86 percent positive experiences rating, Paraguayans are the happiest of the lot.
Of course, this index may not be the final word on who’s happy and who’s not. There are other ways to rank happiness, including by measuring “Life Satisfaction.” By this measure Scandinavian countries cluster at the top. This index asks respondents to place themselves on a ladder with their best possible life at the top and their worst at the bottom. In other words, in order to place yourself on the ladder, you have to imagine how good or bad things could be. For that reason, some experts think the Life Satisfaction Index measures not so much happiness as social status.
What the Positive Experiences Index shows us, with less economically advantaged nations perched at the top, is that being happy in your daily life requires more than money. But F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, and Charlie Brown already told us that.
’til next time,
Avery
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