Happiness has been a factor that many scholars and scientists have focused on for a long time. There are many indices that are created specifically for monitoring the level of people’s happiness. While some countries tend to take the highest ranks on the lists, others are on the bottom, indicating low satisfaction of communities. Nevertheless, while such lists are indicative of the quality of life in specific regions, the level of happiness is still decreasing worldwide.
A growing international record is reached for anger, tension, despair, physical discomfort, and anxiety. Values on the index range from 0 to 100, and as indicated in the graph, the negative experience index grew from 24 points in 2006 to 33 points in 2021 (Clifton, 2022). While it could be claimed that the global pandemic contributed significantly to the growing dissatisfaction worldwide, it is still unexplained why the unhappiness trend has been increasing since 2006.
The reason for such a situation can be unstoppable well-being inequality that, while varying from region to region, impacts people’s mental states. For example, Helliwell et al. (2022) emphasized regional trends of happiness-supporting factors and inequality. In this sense, the experts stated that perceptions of corruption, institutional trust, social support, volunteering, donations, and helping strangers contributed to well-being equality. However, the mentioned indices are experiencing challenges in most countries, even developed nations. For example, European institutional trust started declining in 2006, indicating a slow increase from 2010 and has decreased rapidly since 2020 (Helliwell et al., 2022). In turn, social support in countries of Latin America has been dropping since 2011 (Helliwell et al., 2022). All these factors indicate that well-being equality directly impacts the global happiness level.
Thus, the level of contentment with people’s lives has been decreasing, indicating concern not only for developing but for developed countries. While temporary situations, such as pandemics, can be blamed, there are deeper issues than this. The level of satisfaction is generally connected to well-being equality. In this sense, well-being inequality tends to make people less happy. The statistics indicate that while there have been slight improvements in institutional trust and social support, the overall trend has been decreasing, which leads to unhappiness.
References
Clifton, J. (2022). The global rise of unhappiness. Gallup. Web.
Helliwell, J.F., Layard, R., Sachs, J.D., De Neve, J., Aknin, L.B & Wang, S. (2022). World happiness report. Web.