160 - The Possibility of Happiness Amid War and Mayhem

            Are you happy, despite the gloom of war and these columns?  The recently released 2023 World Happiness Report says that the world’s peoples are just as happy as they were last year and the year before. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has not caused global happiness to decline, or so the report avers.  The report also says that for the sixth year in a row, Finns are the happiest people in the world (despite living next to Russia) and, hardly surprisingly, that Afghans are uniformly the least happy people on the planet.

            Following Finland in the rankings are Denmark, Iceland, Israel, and the Netherlands, in that order. Then Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and New Zealand, number 10 on the charts.  Canada is 13^th, the United States 15^th, and the United Kingdom 19^th.  Costa Rica is 23^rd, Singapore 25^th, and Taiwan 27^th.  Japan is 47^th. China 64^th, Russia 70^th, South Africa 85^th, Ukraine 92^nd, Turkey 106^th, Ethiopia 124^th, Botswana (the most democratic country in Africa), 132^nd, the Democratic Republic of Congo 133^rd, and Zimbabwe (a rampantly corrupt autocracy), 134^th.  

This year 137 countries were surveyed, but not Bhutan, the country that declared that happiness was the purpose of life on earth and provoked the United Nations to start measuring happiness in 2012.  In 2011, Bhutan, which thought itself the happiest place around, invited national governments to “give more importance to happiness and well-being in determining how to achieve and measure social and economic development.”

            This year’s results hold some surprises. Not the high ratings of the well-run Nordic countries, nor the scores of European nations (although France and Italy are ranked lower than Canada and the United States), but Japan is an outlier and Russia seems higher on the list than one might have expected.

Unsurprisingly, the effectiveness of a government has a major influence, says the report, on human happiness everywhere. Yet throughout, life evaluations have continued to be remarkably consistent, with global averages in the Covid-19 years just as high as those in the pre-pandemic years from 2017 to 2019.

            To some extent, happiness seems correlated with per capita GDP. The wealthiest countries are happy, poorer ones not.  Of the first 50 countries on this index, only Nicaragua (40^th), a dictatorship, is poor. El Salvador (50^th) and another autocracy, has great pockets of poverty. Otherwise, the happiest 50 countries are more prosperous than nations lower down in the scores.

According to the makers of the World Happiness Report, “Life evaluations from the Gallup World Poll provide the basis for the annual happiness rankings.” More than 100,000 persons across the world placed themselves on the ladder in 2022, providing this year’s results.

The rankings are based on their individual answers to self-placements on an imaginary “ladder:” Readers: On which ladder step of happiness do you stand now, and five-years from now?

            The researchers further refined their analysis by employing variables like GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption to assess their impact on the happiness of respondents.

Benevolence, Altruism, and Social Connectedness

            The happiness evaluators say there was a globe-spanning surge of benevolence in 2020 and especially in 2021. Data for 2022 show that prosocial acts remain about one-quarter more common than before the pandemic, a blemish in an otherwise happy set of findings.

Both Ukraine and Russia shared the global increases in benevolence during 2020 and 2021. During 2022, however, the report says that benevolence grew sharply in Ukraine but fell in Russia. And, to my surprise, the report indicates that despite the magnitude of suffering and damage in Ukraine, life evaluations in late 2022 remained higher than in the aftermath of the annexation of Ukraine in 2014, showing remarkable Ukrainian resilience. The report also suggests that Ukraine in 2022 exhibited a “stronger sense of common purpose, benevolence, and trust” in its leadership than ever before – a testament to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s effective leadership. Confidence in Ukraine’s government grew in 2022. Belief in Putin’s Russian leadership “fell to zero” in all parts of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2022, polling data showed that positive social connections were twice as prevalent as loneliness in seven key countries spanning six global regions. These results were “strongly tied to overall ratings of how satisfied people are with their relationships with other people.”

According to pollsters from the Sustainable Development Network, there was a strong relationship between happiness and behaving altruistically. Normally, the report concludes, “people who receive altruistic help will experience improved well-being, which helps explain the correlation across countries.” In addition, there is much evidence (experimental and others) that helping behavior increases the well-being of the individual helper. This is especially true, the report indicates, when the helping behavior “is voluntary and mainly motivated by concern for the person being helped.”  Readers take note!

             The message is clear: live in a wealthy, well-managed, non-corrupt, country and your chances of being happy are positive. But being altruistic and benevolent are key. So does having lots of social connections and reaching out. It is evident, too, that even in extreme circumstances like the punishing invasion of Ukraine, citizens can remain reasonably happy if they have faith in their leadership and trust their government. Resilience further flows from believing in the future – despite all the nastiness that Putin is directing toward Ukraine.  

            To achieve sustainable joy, peace is better than war. Leadership integrity gives citizens a major boost.  Being secure in the face of missile bombardments helps. So do glimpses of a future where freedom prevails. 

Let those possibilities return for persecuted minorities everywhere, for those afflicted by acute hunger, and for those valiant Ukrainians who spend their days in water-filled trenches, resisting Russians.