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Maybe you’ve sensed the world spiralling into utter chaos, which isn’t hard to do when experts predict AI-induced human extinction and climate change threatens to seal our fate anyway.
Perhaps you have children, and you’re acutely aware of the alarming state of mental health among the youth that dominates the conversation.
Yet, somehow, the world is actually doing okay…
The Gallup Global Emotions Report for 2024, released last Tuesday, reports on the annual state of two global indexes – one for positive emotions, the other for negative.
The report doesn’t offer yet another critique of why GDP isn’t a perfect indicator of progress and instead complements GDP in trying to give us a quick sense of how society is actually doing, per VOX.
As it stands, the topline results from the Gallup report look pretty good, with positive emotions reaching a score of 71 out of 100 worldwide, the highest since the pandemic began.
Meanwhile, negative emotions have tapered off for the first time since 2014, with young people, among all age groups, by far, the best off.
They experienced more positive emotions than anyone else and fewer negative ones. And in both directions, that’s been the case since measurement began in 2006.
Lighten up, folks, we’re all fine.
To make things really interesting, not a single highly economically developed country is to be found in the top ranks of Gallup’s Positive Experiences Index.
Rather, the list is dominated by Latin American and Southeast Asian countries.
Would you look at that? All you need is…less?
Comparing happiness levels across countries with different cultures can be tricky, but it does make you wonder about the emotional well-being of industrialised nations. It also highlights how tough it is to measure something as intangible and fuzzy as our feelings.
The Gallup emotions survey polls about 1,000 respondents from each of the 142 included countries and asks questions from each end of the emotion spectrum. On the Positive Experience Index, the questions might be ‘Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?’ or ‘Did you experience enjoyment during a lot of the day yesterday?’ while on the Negative Experience Index asks whether respondents felt physical pain, worry, sadness, stress, or anger the day before.
By this measure, the world’s happiest countries are places like Paraguay, Indonesia, and Thailand.
But hang on, we’ve always been told – for seven years in a row now – that Finland is the happiest country in the world.
That ranking comes from the World Happiness Report, which also uses data collected by Gallup, but asks different questions that focus on life satisfaction, rather than daily experiences. Again, this proves how difficult it is to pinpoint something as intangible as feelings.
This is all rather odd considering a 2021 global survey of 10,000 young people aged 16-25 that found 75% think the “future is frightening,” 55% agree that “the things I most value will be destroyed,” and 56% agree that “humanity is doomed.”
Stacking all these studies together, you get the idea that positive emotions are pervasive among a majority of young people, but they also think that everything around them is going to shit.
In other words, people are reporting that they’re personally doing fine, but it’s everything else — the local economy, the global economy — that’s terrible.
Yup, pretty much.