It's all over the news in Salt Lake, Ogden, Provo, Logan and even St. George, but Utah is the happiest state in the union. That's the word from a Gallup poll co-sponsored by Healthways and America's Health Insurance Plans (that's an organization, not just a method of not typing a lot of names) that's intended to measure well-being. The same poll finds teeth-gnashing in Wheeling, since West Virginia is the least happy place in the U.S. — kind of an anti-Disneyland, it seems. (And they're not dancing in the Dakotas either.) We point this out since our Ryan Blitstein asked last year, on ... Read More
Old and Happy? It’s a Matter of Attitude
December 2, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
It’s not easy getting old. The body starts to break down, and the mind begins to fade. These things, it is often thought, will leave us depressed and unhappy. As researchers are finding out, however, they actually don’t. These ravages of time, as it turns out, have very little to do with one’s happiness. Actually, older people report being just as happy, if not happier, than their younger compatriots. Researchers who study aging and happiness have dubbed this the “paradox of well-being.” But why? What’s going on? Last summer, four researchers in the University of Virginia ... Read More
Is TV an Opiate for the Unhappy?
November 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
If you find yourself going overtime on the TIVO or planning your evenings around variations of CSI, it might be time to get happy. A new analysis of the data collected in the General Social Survey from 1975 to 2006 — chronicling the activity patterns of 30,000 adults over three decades — shows that happy people were more socially and religiously active, voted frequently and read more newspapers. Unhappy folks, on the other hand, watched significantly more TV in their spare time, according to the paper published in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators ... Read More
Should the Government Make Us Happy?
May 19, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
Tim Kasser wants to be happy. If you live in America, odds are, so do you. There's a crucial difference between you and Kasser, though. After two decades of poring over and contributing to academic research on what makes people happy or unhappy, anxious or depressed, Kasser can predict what's likely to keep him content and what isn't. He makes life choices based on those studies; he thinks if you did the same, you might end up happier. And he thinks it's time the government helps you get happy. The research tells Kasser that Americans are cash-wealthy, time-poor and not as happy as they ... Read More
