If you ask people to place themselves on a ladder of life satisfaction, you'll get a different answer than if you ask the same group of people about the emotions they felt the day before.
By conjuring the image of a societal ladder, the life satisfaction approach might actually be measuring something closer to social status than happiness, my colleague Sigal Samuel argues. "The poisonousness of social comparison can also help make sense of the observation that higher GDP doesn't always correlate with increased happiness," she writes. "The US has a high GDP, but it also has extremely high inequality. So a lot of Americans are comparing themselves to other, richer Americans — and becoming more miserable as a result."
Measuring daily emotional experiences could circumvent the concern of biasing results toward status. But it could also miss a bunch of other considerations associated with a happy life or, certainly, progress. Amartya Sen, the famous development economist, argued that reducing welfare to pleasurable mental conditions "can be very misleading, since it may fail to reflect a person's real deprivation." Humans are remarkably adaptive, and may still find and report pleasurable experiences while living in conditions of extreme poverty, limited opportunities for education and social mobility, or political oppression.
Interestingly, not a single country from the G7 — an informal group of economic powerhouses that meet annually to coordinate on global governance — is to be found at the top of either list. If there were a G7 formed on the basis of happiness, rather than economic development, it would consist of countries like Paraguay and Indonesia, not the US or Germany. If we had a life satisfaction G7, it'd mostly just be Scandinavia.
The vibecession paradox in young people
As revealed in Gallup's report: young people have been more positive than anyone else for almost two decades, and were quickest to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels of feeling good. Even zooming in on the US, where youth anxiety and depression have increased over the past two decades, the Gallup report says that whatever's been going on, positive experiences are still more pervasive among the young than anyone else.
Part of this discrepancy could boil down to methodology. The survey defines "young" as anyone between the ages of 15 and 30. The report contains no data on adolescents younger than 15, which is where a good deal of the youth mental health crisis (which seems mostly confined, curiously, to English-speaking countries) is happening.
But it's still pretty interesting that young people between the ages of 15 and 30 show up as consistently more positive and resilient than any other group. Where is the specter of doomerism we keep hearing about?
For example, a 2021 global survey of 10,000 young people aged 16-25 found that 75 percent think the "future is frightening," 55 percent agree that "the things I most value will be destroyed," and 56 percent agree that "humanity is doomed."
Stack these two surveys next to each other — positive emotions are pervasive among a majority of young people, but they also think that everything around them is going to shit — and you get a tension that looks oddly like the vibecession.
Beneath the headlines of the vibecession, describing the still ongoing paradox of an economy that is really good on paper but really bad according to the people living in it, something more nuanced seems to be going on. People are reporting that they're personally doing fine. It's everything else — the local economy, the national economy — that's terrible.
The global emotions paradox seems similar. The prevailing mood looks something like: "I'm fine, but humanity is doomed."
The wealth of emotions
Projects that try to expand our repertoire of indicators that tell us something about how we're doing as a civilization are worth celebrating. But we should also make sure we learn our lesson from the GDP days.
What makes a fixation on GDP problematic has little to do with an error or bias in the measure itself. It's a very useful measure of economic activity (and really does track pretty well with life satisfaction). But even the guy who created it, economist Simon Kuznets, warned in 1934 that "the welfare of a nation can ... scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income."
Nevertheless, GDP became shorthand for progress, warping it into something it was never meant to be. Similarly, surveys that try to keep track of the intangible aspects of societal health are wonderful complements to GDP. But the intangibles of the mind, by their very definition, resist measurement. If I felt the most intense, pure, concentrated form of bliss I'd ever known yesterday, could a survey question really capture that? Which is to say, we should hold these results lightly, and look at well-being from other perspectives, too.
Even so, the emotions survey is already turning up a handful of mysteries to explore. Why are none of the most highly developed countries rich in positive emotions? Are young people doing a bit better than we thought? What lessons in governance for well-being might we learn from Paraguay, or Finland?
We could be coming out of a time when metrics like GDP fixated us on building societies that look good on paper. By turning intangible stuff into tractable data points, however imperfectly, maybe these kinds of surveys will help turn our attention toward judging and designing societies based on how it actually feels to be a part of them, scrutinizing the direct emotional experience of being enmeshed in their cities, people, technologies, and landscapes. Maybe then, we can all join the young in their apparently resilient and positive experiences of the world.
—Oshan Jarow, staff writer
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