Here is the full text of happiness expert Meik Wiking’s talk: The Dark Side of Happiness at TEDxCopenhagen event conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So according to the United Nations World Happiness Report, Denmark is the happiest country in the world.
Nevertheless, today before the strike of midnight, somebody in Denmark is going to take his or her own life. And another one again tomorrow, and the next day. This year, we will have more than 500 people who kill themselves, or three times as many as are killed in traffic.
Now these are the global suicide rates. Many people mistakenly believe that Denmark has some of the highest rates in the world. Fortunately, that’s not true. We rank somewhere in the middle.
But why is the happiest country in the world not at the bottom of the list when it comes to suicide?
I believe that part of the reason is that it’s more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society.
Now I study happiness. Every day I get up and I try to answer one simple question: Why are some people happier than others?
It gets me up in the morning but sometimes it also keeps me awake at night. I’m told when musicians see musical notes, they can hear that music in their mind. The same thing happens to me when I look at happiness data.
I don’t hear music but I do hear the comforting sounds of lives well lived. I hear the sound of joy, the feeling of connectedness and the sense of purpose.
But I also hear a silence. I hear the silence of those people that felt that life was not worth living. And I fear that their silence might be the dark side of our happiness.
So today I want to speak up for those that no longer have a voice, and today I want you to get to an understanding of why we need to start to address well-being inequality and bridge the gap.
So together we will look at income, jobs, loneliness, social media, and the suicide-happiness paradox.
But first, I want to address the skepticism that I know some of you hold towards happiness research. I saw some of you on the first row smiling when I mentioned I study happiness; that’s fine.
But let’s all be honest for a second. Show of hands: how many of you are skeptical towards happiness research, or our ability to measure happiness? All the way up. OK, so it’s around 50%. I’ve seen worse.
So let’s address the issues. I mean, I’m sure one of your concerns is that we might have different perceptions of what happiness is. You might think it’s one thing; I might think it’s another.
So first, we need to acknowledge that happiness is an umbrella term. We read different things into it. So what we do is we break it down. We look at the different components that happiness consists of.
So when we and the United Nations and the OECD and the different governments we try to measure happiness and we try to quantify quality of life, we look at, at least, three different dimensions.
First, we look at life satisfaction. So basically we ask people to take a step back and evaluate their lives: how satisfied are you all in all? Or how happy are you on a scale from zero to 10?
Or imagine the best possible life you could lead and the worst possible life you could lead, where do you feel you stand right now? This is the dimension that Denmark always do well on.
The second dimension is more about what kind of emotions we experience on an everyday basis. So if you take yesterday, were you stressed, angry, worried, depressed, or did you feel happy? Did you laugh and did you feel loved?
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Of course, these two dimensions are linked. If you have an everyday which is characterized by a lot of positive emotions, you are more likely to experience or report higher levels of life satisfaction. This dimension, though, is much more volatile. We can see there is a weekend effect on this one.
So the third dimension is also called the eudemonic dimension. That’s just the ancient Greek word for happiness. And it refers to what Aristotle thought happiness was. And to him, the good life was the meaningful life. So people have a sense of purpose.
So let’s take the first dimension, and think about what your answer would be: if I asked you… and don’t worry; I’m not going to ask you to share it with guy next to you. But how happy are you all in all on a scale from zero to 10? How happy are you? You have a number in mind?
So what I would do is I would follow you and the rest of the audience and 10,000 people over the next 10 years, because over the next decade, some of you are going to get a promotion; congratulations. Some of you are going to get fired, and some of you are going to find the love of your life. And some of you are going to lose someone you love.
So what I’m interested in is how those changes in your life circumstances impacts your happiness. What is the average impact on happiness from finding love? That’s what I’m interested in.
And then it doesn’t matter whether you and I have different perceptions of what happiness is.
Now all these questions about happiness and satisfaction and purpose, they’ve been asked and answered a million times across the world. And now we can start to see patterns.
So whether you’re from Denmark or the UK or the US or China or India, what do happy people have in common? That’s what we try to find out.
So basically, we use the same methods that have been applied within medicine. So for decades we’ve been studying: why do some people live to see 100? And because of those studies we know that smoking, alcohol, exercise, and diet matters when it comes to our life expectancy.
We try and use the same methods to look at happiness.
So another issue you might say is happiness is subjective. Yes happiness is very subjective. To me that’s not an issue; that’s a good thing. Because what I care about is how you experience your life: how happy you are. And I think you’re the best judge and the only expert that can tell me about how it is to walk in your shoes.
And I think we tend to forget that we study a lot of things that are subjective by nature. We look at depression; we look at stress; we look at anxiety. Those are also subjective.
So what happiness… at the end of the day, it’s about how we as individuals feel about our lives. And I’m yet to hear convincing argument why happiness should be the one thing that we cannot study in a scientific manner. And I think we should, because I think it’s what matters the most.
Okay. So let me ask you a different question: Imagine you could live in one of two worlds. In the first world, you make $50,000 per year. Everybody else makes $25,000. In the second world, you make $100,000 per year, so twice as much as before but everybody else makes $200,000. Our prices are constant. So this is Copenhagen. A cup of coffee still cost 5 euros.
But think about it: Where would you prefer to live? Where you make $50,000, everybody else makes $25,000 or $100,000, everybody else makes $200,000?
Show of hands: how many of you would prefer to live in the first world? So around 20%; that’s a little bit below average. But you guys, you’re weird, you’re TED audience.
On average we see 50% choose the first world. And why do we do that? Why would we want to live in a place where we can consume less? The reason is we care not only about absolute income but we care about relative income, because we care about our social position.
Social comparisons matter, and they impact how we feel about our lives. And income is not the only place where we make social comparisons; we also make them in our social life.
Now we can all imagine that Christmas must be a difficult time of year if you are lonely. But actually, according to some studies, it’s this time of year, spring and the upcoming summer that are worse. Because it’s this time of year that you can see people gathering in parks and at the beach for picnics and barbecues.
In the words of one respondent in one of these surveys, he said, “Summer is a nightmare for a lonely person. Everywhere you go you see people hanging out. In the supermarket, you see friends shopping for barbecues and picnic, and there you are by yourself with a liter of milk in one hand and a rope in the other.”
Social comparisons matter, and they impact how we feel.
We can also all imagine that being the odd one out is difficult. We also know that unemployment have a devastating effect on our happiness. We lose our income, we lose our sense of identity, we lose some of the relationships we have with co-workers. So it’s perhaps no surprise that being unemployed is associated with a higher risk of suicide.
What is surprising is that there is a higher risk of suicide in an area with low unemployment than high unemployment. The reason is of course that it might be easier to find a new job where there is low unemployment than high unemployment.
But there is also a lot more social stigma. If you are the only one around unemployed, then you’re not going to blame the economy, then you might start to question yourself. Social comparisons matter.
And we see this again and again. So because we see this all the time we wanted to do an experiment at the Happiness Research Institute. We wanted to see how social media affects our perception of reality and how we feel about our lives.
Now every time I log on to Facebook, I see people finishing Iron Mans and going on perfect vacations and people having this for breakfast. This morning I had coffee and a banana; it was good but it was not like this.
So social media is this constant bombardment of great news that happens for everybody else. So we wanted to see how that affects us.
So we got 1,100 people to sign up for our experiment and we ran our surveys on them about happiness. And then we randomized them into two groups.
So one group would continue to do as they usually do, our controlled group. And then our treatment group we asked to take a week’s break from Facebook. Then after the week we surveyed both groups again to see the effect.
Now to be honest, when we started the experiment, I didn’t think we would see an effect at all, for two reasons.
First, there are so many factors that influence our happiness: everything from genetics, money, where you live, who you live with, job status, you name it.
Secondly, if our theory is correct that social media distorts our perception of reality, well that’s something that has been accumulated over years. I’m sure many of you like me have been on Facebook since 2008.
So would we really reset that long period’s effect by just one week? I didn’t think so.
Nevertheless, what we found was not only did the people who went without Facebook for one week report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction but pretty much every indicator of happiness we had measured was improved.
Now we’re yet to understand the long-term effects, and study them of this experiment. But for now I see it as another piece of evidence that supports the theory that being exposed to other people’s happiness can have a negative impact on our life.
That brings us to the Suicide Happiness paradox or the notion that happier countries have higher levels of suicide rates.
Now these are the global data. Every dot here represents a country. We look for evidence between life satisfaction and suicide rates. We don’t see any pattern; there’s no correlation.
But if we look more closely and we isolate groups within cultures, we start to see patterns emerge. These are Western countries and here we find a correlation. Happier countries have slightly higher levels of suicide.
And if we look even more closely, we could take the U.S. and look at the individual states and we find the same pattern. Happier states have higher suicide rates. Hawaii is the second happiest state; they have the fifth highest suicide rate.
So we find that social comparisons matter. We care about our relative income. We look at other people when we compare our social life. We see that it’s harder to face unemployment when you are the only unemployed around. And we see that being exposed to other people’s happiness can make us question whether our life is worth living at all.
And I think these are all pieces of evidence that it is harder to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society. But there is a dark side to our happiness and there are people living in that shadow.
So that’s why I want us to start talking about well-being inequality and bridge that gap. And for more than a century we’ve been talking about economic inequality, thanks to the idea of an Italian statistician called Gini. And we know that economic inequality causes crime, social unrest and even armed conflict.
But it’s time also to look beyond economic equality and inequality, also because when we hear these things that Denmark is the happiest country in the world, those rankings are based on averages. And we need to look beyond averages, because from a ranking point of view, it would make equal sense to increase a person from a nine to a 10 as it would do to increase a person from a one to a 2.
But I believe we have a moral obligation to focus our attention to where well-being is most scarce and bridge the gap.
Now the World Happiness Report published just three weeks ago, state that well-being inequality has a larger negative impact on how we feel about our lives than does economic inequality.
So that’s why my final words are these: I think time has come to start addressing well-being inequality and bridge the gap and to take notice there are people that are living in the dark side of our happiness. And to honor that noble idea that the best measure of any society is how we treat our most vulnerable citizens and to reconsider whether your breakfast will taste just as good even if you don’t post it on Instagram.
