Happiness is an odd thing to measure.
To begin with, it’s incredibly subjective. For instance, let’s suppose you’re a Gallup pollster and you ask me, “Were you happy last year?” while I’m listening to Pachelbel’s organ fugues on the Magnificat or William Byrd’s Ne irascaris. I’m likely to answer yes. On a scale of 1–10, I would rate my happiness at an 8 (if I’m singing Byrd, that’d be a 10).
On the other hand, let’s suppose it’s 5 p.m. on a Thursday. I’ve just gotten out of a string of long meetings, and I still have a weekend column I want to tackle. I’ve been pestered all day by messages from co-workers, friends, and family members who all need something from me. Given that my Friday to-do list is growing, my answer will likely be less enthusiastic.
Of course, these are incredibly personal examples that apply to one individual, and my hypothetical answers have very little to do with what happened last year. Now take my answers and their circumstances and expand that to several thousand Americans, and you get the non-results of Gallup’s recently released 12th annual World Happiness Report.
In that report, Gallup found that happiness among Americans dropped drastically last year. The U.S. fell to 23rd in the rankings, a decline primarily driven by “Americans under 30 feeling worse about their lives,” explained Gallup.
We have all sorts of fodder for commentary here. We could talk about an economy that feels as though it’s fizzling and food and service prices that are rocketing. Politics took a rather depressing turn after Republicans discovered that their only choices in the upcoming election were bickering mini-Trumps who didn’t add up to the real thing, while the man himself was targeted by the Justice Department they once trusted. Meanwhile, Democrats quickly found themselves forced into backing a candidate who suffers from a severe case of dementia.
As a member of that class of Americans under the age of 30, I believe I can speak about the role social media has played in ensuring that we (mostly Gen Z) don’t have traditional (i.e., face-to-face) relationships with real people. I could talk about the lack of community, the growing costs of education and housing, and the sense we have that the political world we’re about to inherit is deeply corrupted. Then there’s the lies we’ve been told about fundamental realities like sex and identity — lies that some of my generation have bought into.
Those are all great things to talk about. But it feels wrong to do so in the context of this new report — because I don’t trust it. This is the problem with statistics: They frequently measure something but rarely what they’re purported to measure. It’s possible that Americans were less happy last year than ever before, but, given the nature of happiness, that can’t be objectively demonstrated.
I’m not even sure I could tell you whether I was happier last week than the week before.
Why does all this matter? Stats like these are used all the time, both by conservatives and liberals, to illustrate useless points about the direction of American culture. The problem is that sociology is fickle, and we can talk about stats until we’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t make either representative of reality.
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