You would have expected the crises of the last few years to make us reclusive and hard-hearted, instead people around the world have been more willing to help each other navigate challenges.
Covid be not proud. World Happiness Report 2023 has found that the pandemic years have not adversely affected people’s happiness. It is surprising given the death and destruction of the years past couple of years. There is an explanation. Interviews with thousands of people found people have been helping each other, donating, and volunteering more than before the pandemic—especially in Ukraine.
When asked to evaluate their lives on a scale of one to 10, people on average gave scores just as high in 2020-22 as in 2017-19. The World Happiness Report this year is a triannual analysis of 2020-2022, heavily influenced by Covid and other significant challenges like climate disasters.
Overseen by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the report is released every year in honor of the International Day of Happiness on March 20. It draws on interviews with around 1,000 people in each of over 150 countries. The ranking of the countries is based on data from sources like the Gallup World Poll, leveraging six key factors: social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption.
This year, the United States climbed from #16 to #15 in the world, just below Canada (#13) and Australia (#12). The top slots as before are occupied by Scandinavian countries. Afghanistan is the unhappiest country in the world.
Overall, life satisfaction did dip slightly in Western industrial countries, but it rose slightly everywhere else.
“It’s amazing,” said John Helliwell, a professor of economics at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the report as quoted by The Guardian newspaper of London. “People ended up discovering their neighbors. People were checking in more regularly [with other generations] so that sense of isolation was not as much as you would expect … Even during these difficult years, positive emotions have remained twice as prevalent as negative ones, and feelings of positive social support twice as strong as those of loneliness.”
Having someone to count on in life—which about 80% of the world does—was even more important for our happiness these past few years than before the pandemic struck in early. And increases in kindness throughout the world have helped protect people’s well-being.
The World Happiness Report typically looks at three clues to benevolence: whether people helped a stranger, donated, or volunteered in the past month. By those indications, we are a kinder society today than we were in 2019. Helping, donating, and volunteering all rose worldwide in 2020. Countries where benevolence was previously less common, like those in Eastern Europe, saw the greatest gains in kindness and helping. In the U.S., the percentage of those who had recently helped a stranger went up from about 64% in 2019 to about 76% in 2022.
This same surge of kindness spread in Ukraine, after Russia’s invasion in February 2022. Last year, more people had donated money (70%, up from 22% in 2019), helped strangers (78%, up from 32%), and volunteered (37%, up from 7%).
It’s not all good news in this year’s report. Happiness inequality—the gap between the top half of the population and the bottom half in terms of their life satisfaction—continues to increase. This gap is also widening in terms of how worried, angry, and sad people are feeling.
Lead photo courtesy CDC on Unsplash
