The General Social Survey asks Americans to rate their happiness levels. Between 1990 and 2018, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent.
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In the most recent iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate from Gallup data collected in 2014, 2015 and 2016 across 155 countries indicates that just 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. Two-thirds are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged.
Again, people skipped around 40 percent of their day, and on average, people were happier during the times they kept than they were unhappy during the times they skipped. Taking both duration and intensity into account, the negative experiences were only bad enough to cancel out 58 percent of people’s positive experiences.
Part 2: I SEE YOU IN YOUR STRUGGLES
EIGHT: The Epidemic of Blindness
“Between 1999 and 2019, American suicide rates increased by 33 percent. Between 2009
and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported “persistent feelings of sadness or
hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. By 2021, it had shot up to 44 percent. The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well.
In 2018, the Pew Research Center asked Americans what gives them meaning in life. Only
7 percent said helping other people. Only 11 percent said that learning was a source of
meaning in their life.
In 2010 Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University tried to quantify the relationship of money to happiness using a year-long Gallup survey that resulted in a massive dataset of 450,000 daily responses from a nationally representative sample of one thousand people.
Deaton and Kahneman showed that in the United States, $75,000 seemed to be a kind of magic number at that time. Once a household income was more than $75,000 per year, which was close to the average family income in the U.S. at the time of the study, the amount of money that people earned showed no clear relationship to daily reports of enjoyment and laughter, which were used as indicators of emotional well-being.