Are You Happy?
Chances are if someone were to ask you, right now, if you were happy, you’d say you were.[1] Claiming that you’re happy—that is, to an interviewer who is asking you to rate your “life satisfaction” on a scale from zero to ten—appears to be nearly universal, as long as you’re not living in a war zone, on the street, or in extreme emotional or physical pain. The Maasai of Kenya, soccer moms of Scarsdale, the Amish, the Inughuit of Greenland, European businessmen—all report that they are happy. When happiness researcher Ed Diener, the past president of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, synthesized 916 surveys of over a million people in forty-five countries, he found that, on average, people placed themselves at seven on the zero-to-ten scale.[2]
No doubt the conditions in which these 916 surveys were taken, and their methodologies and measures, were inconsistent. In some cases, respondents were approached face-to-face, at home. In others, they were interviewed by phone. Some conversations were mediated by translators, others by village elders. In some surveys, people were asked, “Generally speaking would you say you are very happy, fairly happy, not too happy?” In others they were asked how they’d rank, on a one-to-seven scale, the conditions of their life. In yet another they were asked to locate themselves on a ladder of self-satisfaction, where the bottom rung, zero, was “the worst possible life” and the top rung, ten, was “the best possible life.”
Click here for the full article and a list of books about happiness, including the book by Tal Ben-Shahar that inspired ButterBeeHappy.com.
Tags: Books, International Society of Quality of Life Studies, Tal Ben-shahar