Across the world, negative emotions reached a record high last year, says the head of Gallup. But the problem began long before the pandemic. In a guest essay, he urges policymakers to respond
CONOMISTS, STATISTICIANS and other experts know how to count all sorts of things: unemployment, mortality rates and the size of every country’s economy. They even counted the number of trees in the Sahara Desert. But it remains surprisingly hard to find statistics on one of the most important things: how people feel. That has caused leaders to miss a disturbing trend: the global rise of unhappiness.
Many things can make people unhappy, but the rise of global unhappiness has five main causes according to Gallup’s research: poverty, broken communities, hunger, loneliness and the scarcity of good work. Today, 17% of people find it “very difficult” to get by on their present income—one of the highest shares we have recorded. Broken communities aren’t helping: 2bn people are so unhappy with where they live that they wouldn’t recommend their community to anyone they know.
Just because someone has friends, it doesn’t mean they have good friends. One-fifth of adults do not have anyone they can count on for help. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that loneliness is deadly. It can increase blood pressure and decrease life expectancy. Gallup asks people to imagine their worst- and best-possible lives. If both scenarios represented the poles of a scale from zero to ten, where would they stand today? Fifteen years ago, before the widespread use of social media, 3.4% of people rated their lives a 10 and only 1.6% rated their lives a zero . Now the share of people with the best feasible lives has more than doubled , and the share of people with the worst possible lives has more than quadrupled .
Social media partly explain why. Through online platforms users can see that their misery is not always shared. Comparison is the thief of joy, as the saying goes, and social media enable comparison like nothing else. They bring people all over the world into each other’s homes through handheld devices and more people have smartphones than ever before. But these platforms are only one of the factors behind the rise in global unhappiness, however.
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