DEFINING happiness is subjective and differs across cultures.
Countries all over the world are competing on happiness rankings. Happiness is angling to become the metric of the future.
Authorities are developing “smart” approaches to measuring happiness, mobilising apps and behavioural data that aim to sense, map and explain our happiness.
A Google Scholar search for happiness scholarship published last year will pull up 23,000 hits.
Happiness scholars are setting out to bring together diverse insights from philosophy, psychology, sociology, health perspectives, economics, cultural studies and the arts, to investigate how satisfied people are with their lives and how they assess their wellbeing.
Psychologists were fed up of focusing on distress and disorder, and launched the associated field of positive psychology at this time.
Every three years since 2012, a World Happiness Report releases global rankings of happiness.
The rankings are dominated by Nordic countries, with Finland topping the list.
But is it justifiable to say that happiness can be measured through levels of income, education, social relationships, good national governance and health?
Global economic inequality and high rates of global depression and mental distress persist, thus happiness as a whole has not improved. In Malaysia, how many studies have been done to measure happiness? Are they valid and reliable?
Happiness relates to something outside of ourselves (we feel happy “about” something) and can be transformed by a change in our external circumstances.
Even the idea that subjective wellbeing can be measured by a survey is increasingly contested by economists, who have, for example, identified that people’s assessments of their happiness can be affected by the way in which their country’s education system grades exams, an unusual effect which challenges the validity of global happiness indexes.
We might think of happiness as the opposite of depression, but this does not always appear to be the case. People living with mental health problems can report feeling happy.
Even Finland and Denmark have high suicide rates, as reported in a new study, which set out to expose contradictions in the Nordic dominance of global happiness league tables.
Isabella Arendt, a researcher at the Danish Happiness Research Institute, sees happiness as a relative and dynamic term, which seems far more sensible.
“Even if we lived in a utopia, there would still be unhappy people.
“Creating the conditions to promote wellbeing may in fact be driven by a sense of dissatisfaction and unhappiness with the status quo.”
The study highlighted that “less happy people are more likely to be politically active than happy ones”.
Little wonder then that increased scientific knowledge on happiness has not led to significant social change.
Tracking happiness is all well, but before we use such maps to determine how we are governed, we need to understand what happens to our happiness when it becomes an emotion to be mapped, measured and managed.
KHERU KHEK
Kuala Lumpur