MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO IS THE HAPPIEST OF THEM ALL
Every year Gallup and its associates poll the world’s countries to determine their levels of happiness and freedom. And every year, with some variation, the same countries emerge on top.
The fifteen happiest countries in 2022 were:
1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Switzerland
5. Netherlands
6. Luxembourg
7. Sweden
8. Norway
9. Israel
10. New Zealand
11. Austria
12. Australia
13. Ireland
14. Germany
15. Canada
The fifteen freest countries in 2022 were:
1. Switzerland
2. New Zealand
3. Denmark
4. Estonia
5. Ireland
6. Canada
7. Finland
8. Australia
9. Sweden
10. Luxembourg
11. Netherlands
12. Iceland
13. Norway
14. The United Kingdom
The United States
The two lists are strikingly similar: the freest people are also the happiest. They conglomerate in Northern Europe. Most have small populations - around five million people - making them easier to govern. Most are western democracies. Most are Protestant, lacking internal theological tensions. In general, these educated people are racially, linguistically and culturally homogeneous. When clans, ethnicities, religions, tribes, immigrants and other manifestations of differences, live in close proximity, conflict is common. Bigger countries have greater diversity, and therefore, greater internal conflicts. The absence of tribal animosities helps explain their stability.
The United States did not fare as well as we might have expected: fifteenth in freedom and seventeenth in happiness. Not bad for a country with 330,000,000 non-homogeneous people, but we are far from number one in these categories.
The 2024 survey, published in March, had some surprises.
For the first time since this poll began in 2012, the United States dropped out of the 20 happiest countries, falling from fifteenth to twenty-third. A substantial drop. Even more concerning is that Americans under the age of thirty ranked sixty-third in happiness; those over the age of sixty ranked in the top ten in happiness.
This disparity has been growing for decades. Among those born after 1980, happiness falls with each year of age. Among those born before 1965, satisfaction levels rise with age. Surveys in the 1940s and 50s found that younger people were happier than older people. By 1999, the numbers had flipped: older Americans were happier than the younger. This trend continues today. In 2024, an incredibly low sixteen percent of Generation Z (ages 18 to 25) say they are proud to live in the United States. Baby Boomers came in at a very patriotic seventy-three percent.
What’s going on? These numbers represent an enormous attitudinal shift. Was life better in the past? Were the childhoods of Baby Boomers better than today’s Generation Zs? Why is our oldest generation happy and patriotic, while the youngest is the opposite?
Here are a few possible explanations.
1. According to a poll released on May 10th, 2024, the happiest women are married with children. A few days ago, on May 14th, the place kicker for the Super Bowl champion, Kansas City Chiefs, Harrison Butker, made the following comment to the graduating women in a commencement speech at a Christian college,
How many of you are sitting here now about to cross
this stage, and are thinking about all the promotions
and titles you are going to get in your career? Some
of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world,
but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are
most excited about your marriage and the children you
will bring into this world.
Oh, boy. You’d think he said, “keep the little ladies barefoot, pregnant and ignorant.” Since the happiest women are married with children, Butker’s heartfelt opinion jibes with the reality of women in the real world. Yet the backlash was overwhelmingly negative. Could the current happiness decline be due in part to the many women who chose other paths?
2. A 2024 Pew research poll found that only 57 % of men and 45 % of women who are currently unmarried plan to have children. Why? Because children will use up precious resources. Besides, climate change will end humanity in twelve years. Marriage and family are just sooo twentieth century.
3. Religion is on a steep decline. Increasingly, Americans profess no religion at all. A January 2024 study from Pew Research found that 28 percent of the population is comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is "nothing in particular." Surprisingly, the no religion crowd is now the largest cohort in the U.S. As recently as 2007, the “no religion at all” was only 16 percent.
“When men stop believing in God,” wrote G.K Chesterton, “it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in anything.” Or, I would add, any insanity that promises meaning, acceptances, purpose and power. I would rephrase Chesterton’s aphorism. When men stop believing in God, they latch on to false gods; a person, a love object, a cause, a creed, a philosophy, a celebrity, a political leader, a revolution, a sports team, a mass movement or a war. The antisemitic psychosis currently at our universities is an example. Religion, true or not, comforts. False gods invariably disappoint.
4. Loneliness is rampant. We interact with video games, cell phones, zoom calls, drive through fast foods and banks, and shopping on line. Older people living alone leave their televisions on 24 hours a day for company. In 2018, Great Britain created a Ministry of Loneliness. The title of Robert D. Putam’s 2000 book, Bowling Alone, speaks volumes. (Bowling is a social sport.) Now, a quarter of a century after Putnam’s book, loneliness and its concomitant, depression, is epidemic. Community has been declining for decades. How many neighbors do you know on your floor or your street?
5. Suicide is up dramatically among, teens, especially for boys.
Source – Peter Gray, Ph.D September 3, 2023
Without a sense of purpose, idleness is indeed the devil’s workshop. Young people are not genuinely needed. They have no fields to sow, no cows to milk. Kids lack struggle, discipline and guidelines. They have little to push against. Raised by parents and teachers with inconsistent discipline and too few consequences for bad behavior, they become cynical and lost. Bleary-eyed adolescents, with empty and sometimes fearful souls, lounge on couches, staring at screens, drifting into emptiness. Some turn to fentanyl, a drug that kills over one hundred thousand young Americans every year. Drugs have been eroding our lives for over sixty years. No wonder suicides are up.
Just last week, May 12, 2024, a Rand Corporation Study reported by Charles
Wolf, summarized the country’s mood.
The United States might be stumbling toward a decline from which few great powers have ever recovered. It has many of the tools of national recovery but doesn’t yet have a shared recognition of the problem and how to fix it.
When great powers have slid from a position of preeminence or leadership because of domestic factors, they seldom reversed this trend.”
I’d like to say that something is rotten in Denmark, but the Danes are third in freedom and second in happiness in 2024.
Noteworthy - In the latest survey, Israel ranked fifth in happiness. Having experienced the horrifying atrocities of October 7th, an ongoing war taking many more Israeli lives, and standing virtually alone in a hostile world, they remain among the happiest and freest people on the planet. A subject to be explored at another time.
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