Happiness is specific, in the moment and therefore passing. Joy is more fundamental. It endures because it is more elemental. That explains why there is a World Happiness Report issued every year and not a World Joy Report.
This year’s World Happiness Report, released on March 20, has as its theme, “Sharing and Caring”, and how that impacts people’s happiness. Even though it is hard to quantify happiness in specific numbers and even harder to extend it to entire populations of countries by surveying a limited sample size of people, techniques such as deliberately dropping wallets on streets to study how many would be returned were deployed. The overarching idea was to study benevolence and how it plays out in societies as it relates to happiness.
“First, people are much too pessimistic about the benevolence of others. For example, when wallets were dropped in the street by researchers, the proportion of returned wallets was far higher than people expected. This is hugely encouraging,” the executive summary of the report says.
It also says, “Our wellbeing depends on our perceptions of others’ benevolence, as well as their actual benevolence. Since we underestimate the kindness of others, our wellbeing can be improved by receiving information about their true benevolence.”
In that context, a distinct upsurge in overall benevolence during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people became unusually more compassionate, may have subsided since but, according to the World Happiness Report’s finding, “benevolent acts are still about 10% above their pre-pandemic levels”.
The report also examines specific concepts such as whether dining alone is good for people’s wellbeing, it is not, as well as how familial closeness and bonds depend on the household sizes.
“Latin American societies, characterised by larger household sizes and strong family bonds, offer valuable lessons for other societies that seek higher and sustainable wellbeing. We see that happiness rises with household size up to four people, but above that happiness declines. Notably, people living alone are much less happy than people who live with others,” it says.
A finding that stands out is loneliness among young people. “Trends towards increased loneliness are most evident among young people. In 2023, 19% of young adults across the world reported having no one they could count on for social support, a 39% increase compared to 2006”, the report says.
One finding that is fraught with political undertones relates to the degree of benevolence and its impact on a country’s politics. The dramatic political goings-on in America appear to vindicate this particular finding.
“Populism is largely due to unhappiness,” the report finds. “Whether populists are on the left or the right depends on trust. People who trust others veer to the left, those who do not veer to the right.”
In any such report, what draws the readers instantly are the rankings that tell them which are the top 10 happiest countries. So even though happiness as a rule is an individualised and transitory emotion, the World Happiness Report ranks 147 countries in terms of their collective population’s happiness. Finland tops the list for the eighth consecutive year with Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Costa Rica, Norway, Israel, Luxembourg and Mexico completing the top 10.
Factors that go into making countries and people happy are economic stability, health and social infrastructure. Interpersonal relations also play a crucial role in engendering happiness.
In the Southasian context, the rankings have created both amusement and bemusement at the ranking. Pakistan, despite its debilitating economic and political crises, ranks 109th compared to its much larger and economically sound neighbour India at 118th. Sri Lanka and Bangladesh are listed at 133 and 134 respectively while Nepal is pegged at 92. Quite predictably, Afghanistan is the lowest among all 147 countries surveyed. India’s lower ranking than Pakistan caused some chagrin in the former and perhaps some gloating in the latter.
The United States, the world’s largest and richest economy, has been ranked at the 24th place while China, the world’s second-largest economy at the 68th position. Their rankings seem to underscore that individual happiness among populations often does not necessarily flow from the success of their national economies.
Notwithstanding the challenge in quantifying happiness the World Happiness Report makes an interesting attempt to find indicators that help. For instance, “an understudied measure of social connection – sharing meals”.
“Given the relatively objective way in which it is measured, sharing meals is uniquely comparable across countries and cultures, between individuals, and over time, unlike many other social indicators,” it says.
In this context, a comparison between America and many other societies produces highly instructive findings.
“Sharing meals has a strong impact on subjective wellbeing – on par with the influence of income and unemployment. Those who share more meals with others report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction and positive affect, and lower levels of negative affect. This is true across ages, genders, countries, cultures, and regions,” it says.
“In the United States, using data from the American Time Use Survey, the authors find clear evidence that Americans are spending more and more time dining alone. In 2023, roughly 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day – an increase of 53% since 2003. Dining alone has become more prevalent for every age group, but especially for young people,” it says.
A finding that Southasians may find counterintuitive relates to Latin American societies, which the report says are “characterised by larger household sizes and strong family bonds, offer valuable lessons for other societies that seek to enrich relational satisfaction and improve overall happiness metrics and research approaches.” Considering that Southasian countries are home to some of the most socially networked and connected people on the planet, their not finding a mention here may come as a surprise to many.
A journalist since 1981, Mayank Chhaya has reported out of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the United States. His authorised biography, Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic (Doubleday/Random House, 2007), has been published worldwide in nearly 25 languages. He lives in Chicago.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature.
