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World Happiness Report 2026

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Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#51

Post by alephnan »

erelong wrote: post #44

I think social media is being wrongly made in to a scapegoat Rather, social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at, of not having meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, of lacking certain other things that may have existed in the past. Social media offers a new engaging experiment that fills the void of some of these things that don't exist…

Because of social media, there are less teenagers hanging out at the malls. Shops close down. It forms a feedback loop

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#52

Post by contingencies »

Speak to anyone in China and they're less happy this year because the economy is heavily depressed. This is not reflected in the chart. COVID doesn't even appear on most countries' charts despite huge impact globally. I am very skeptical of their process if it results in such questionable macro-narratives. I wonder if their interviewees are "business owners capable of answering the phone in English" or some similarly skewed dataset.

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#53

Post by crossbody »

mjdiloreto wrote: post #16

> On average, heavy social media use (more than five hours per day) is associated with lower wellbeing. Heavy users are significantly more likely to report higher stress and depressive symptoms, and believe they are worse off than their parents, compared with non- or moderate users. I like this framing of social media use in the same terms as drug use. There are significant risks to this activity that so many people…

You quote correlation and then jump to causation. Any high quality evidence for causation that make you confident it's not depression that drives SM use (or something else entirely driving both)?

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#54

Post by 9rx »

throw0101d wrote: post #27
myth_drannon wrote: post #18

It's sad to see Canada drop so much, as much as Congo, Malawi and a bunch of other war torn places.

Young people with difficult housing affordability and general high cost of living is dragging down the score. Boomers that own their homes are more satisfied: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizaUBC22o4&t=4m13s

Except the biggest drop was among teenage girls. Housing affordability and cost of living isn't usually yet a concern to most teenagers, and to the extent that it is a concern, it is equally a concern to teenage boys who haven't felt the same decline in happiness.

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#55

Post by rsolva »

erelong wrote: post #44

I think social media is being wrongly made in to a scapegoat Rather, social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at, of not having meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, of lacking certain other things that may have existed in the past. Social media offers a new engaging experiment that fills the void of some of these things that don't exist…

The term 'social media' has changed a lot over time. The attention grabbing kind we have today is a very different beast than what we started out with; no ads and only a chronological timeline showing posts from your network.

The original kind was genuinely connecting people and adding value. The current one is in effect isolating and driving people and groups apart.

Luckily, the original kind did not vanish. I find a lot of joy hanging out on the fediverse. I spend far less time on it than what I did on Twitter of FB back when I still had accounts there, but that is a good sign.

Social media is too generous term to use when describing products from Meta, TikTok, Snap, X etc. It is an ad platform that also, occasionality, shows you what your friends are up to.

We should come up with a better term than 'social media' when describing platforms that has reached the last stage of enshitification.

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#56

Post by dyauspitr »

alephnan wrote: post #51
erelong wrote: post #44

I think social media is being wrongly made in to a scapegoat Rather, social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at, of not having meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, of lacking certain other things that may have existed in the past. Social media offers a new engaging experiment that fills the void of some of these things that don't exist…

Because of social media, there are less teenagers hanging out at the malls. Shops close down. It forms a feedback loop

Well they’re also closing down because most people buy the vast majority of their stuff online now.

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#57

Post by applfanboysbgon »

9rx wrote: post #50
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Research shows time and time again that deep social connection is the key, if you will, to happiness. Research suggests it, but it does not show it. Psychological research is notoriously unscientific, with most studies not even being replicable because humans are extremely complex and it's basically impossible to design any kind of methodology that concretely controls for all variables, all the more so when we have…

> It is absolutely possible to be happy without deep social connection. Well, of course it is. No matter what you think it is that brings happiness to the general population, there will be at least someone who doesn't find happiness in it. There are always outliers. > If I had to instead spend my days labouring on a farm Farms are where you find the intersection of all cool tech. I have to wonder how someone who enjo…

> No matter what you think it is that brings happiness to the general population, there will be at least someone who doesn't find happiness in it. There are always outliers.

I'm not convinced I'm that much of an psychological outlier, though; I think only my prosperous conditions are themselves a global outlier. I believe that if you gave most people the privilege I have, of having just enough money to pursue the things they love without doing work they don't enjoy, without worrying about being able to afford food, shelter, or medical bills, they would be happy too, with or without social connections.

> Farms are where you find the intersection of all cool tech. I have to wonder how someone who enjoys creating and consuming software would dislike working on a farm.

I need to do intellectually stimulating work to be happy. Repetitive manual labour would drive me insane. My mental image of "labouring on a farm" there was also "poor economic conditions subsistence farming", not "industrial farm with a million dollars worth of cool machinery".

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#58

Post by dyauspitr »

semilin wrote: post #17
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hard to frame a question across languages and cultures. The ladder metaphor isn't the worst.

It's especially hard to express "happiness" across languages. It's a word that is hard to define and generally has no perfect synonyms between languages. It ranges broadly from "present feeling of contentment" to "ultimate feeling of fulfillment in life," and it seems like the survey is aiming for the latter aspect. Therefore the ladder analogy is a decent way to communicate that.

This isn’t gauging happiness but rather if your country is fulfilling your aspirations. I bet someone that works in a role he didn’t really want still might be very happy on a day to day basis but he never had the chance to become the doctor or botanist he always wanted to be.

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#59

Post by temp0826 »

weisnobody wrote: post #40

Well, someone once tried to get happiness classified as a psychiatric disorder: * https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1376114/ (1992) The abstract: “ It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness i…

I guess a Buddhist point of view would be that any emotion/feeling should not be held on to. (It is best to feel and let all things pass, I think, but to consider it a disorder to "hold on" to happiness doesn't seem right...I am not well-read enough about it to know if it can in fact cause suffering)

Re: World Happiness Report 2026

#60

Post by scythe »

alstonite wrote: post #2

It’s interesting to see a country’s internal rank of its own happiness against how I would rank them using my worldview. Israel for example seems like a place that would be fairly unhappy right now given world events, but they rank quite highly. Saudi Arabia also sticks out as unexpected. It seems in the media I hear about their government being quite oppressive (especially against women), so seeing them just above t…

Another big surprise is Mexico. It seems like every day there's another gory story about a bunch of people disappearing or getting shot in a gang war. But they're the second-highest ranked in North America at #12, behind only Costa Rica.

Israel I think is similar to Costa Rica in that whatever problems Israelis have, they look around at their neighbors and realize how much worse it could be.

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