This year’s World Happiness Report focuses on happiness at various ages and stages through life—with some surprising results.
All people on Earth strive to be happy. But what is happiness? How does it differ for people across cultures and at different ages? How is happiness measured?
A new report answers these questions by examining happiness worldwide and the factors that make life worth living.
What Is the World Happiness Report?
It’s hard to imagine anything more meaningful than research exploring happiness and what makes for a good life.
A partnership between Gallup, Oxford University, and the United Nations seeks the answers. The group publishes The World Happiness Report using data from the Gallup World Poll and the analysis of worldwide researchers. The report offers insights into the state of happiness for people all over the planet.
This year’s report examines happiness at various ages and stages throughout life. Past reports have focused on various aspects of happiness—for example, the 2020 report dedicated a chapter to exploring why Nordic countries are consistently the happiest in the world. The 2019 report devoted a chapter to the role of digital media and addiction in the unhappiness of those in the United States. The 2017 report dedicated a chapter to the key determinants of happiness and misery and one on restoring American happiness—a chapter that might be worth revisiting.
The first happiness report, released in 2012, highlighted a worldwide demand that happiness and the absence of misery be given more attention in creating government policy.
The report’s creators believe that “the best measure of progress is the happiness of people worldwide.”
Insights from 2024
One of the most striking insights from this year’s report was the difference in happiness between the young and old.
John F. Helliwell is an emeritus professor of economics at the Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia, and a founding editor of the World Happiness Report. He states in the report that the wide range of data about the quality of life worldwide gathered by the Gallup World Poll, going back to 2006, offers enough data to separate happiness patterns into ages through different generations.
By Emma Suttie, D.Ac, AP
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