Feliz Navidad - Los Straightjackets
Los Straightjackets are an instrumental surf guitar band who perform wearing lucha libre masks. My father recommended their Christmas Songbook to me and I really liked this take on Feliz Navidad. Thinking about felicity and luchadors got me thinking about this graph again:
I found it on the Our World In Data page on global happiness and life satisfaction, in a section on “Culture and life satisfaction”. Self-reported happiness in Latin American countries is higher than you’d expect given their GDP per capita. I forget who I saw speculating about this, but someone else on the internet wondered if this greater happiness is visible in the way that dancing is a more common pastime in LatAm than in CANZUK.
Maybe the causality runs in the opposite direction, though? A meta-analysis on the “Effect of exercise for depression”, published in January 2024, found that exercise is about as effective as SSRIs in treating depression. As Erik Hoel commented: “they really buried the lede, though, because if you look closely at the chart, dancing was literally the best treatment for depression, beating out the combination of exercise + SSRIs handily. There’s something deeply beautiful about that.”
Consider this an invitation to dance around to this song, or to put on another one that inspires you towards movement, and therefore towards felicity.
Que te muevas, quizás hasta bailes, con felicidad,
- Tessa
PS I’m running a day behind on this advent calendar; I’ll aim to send out xmas-3 and xmas-2 tomorrow.