posted 22 years ago
It may not be vice versa. But this whole business of measuring people's happiness across the board sounds like a load of #$&!) to me. For Western countries where societies and economies have been stable for a very, very long time, yeah, you may find more people who are satisfied with their lives the way they are. But for developing countries where people have just started to see opportunities on the horizon, when they say they are not happy with their lives, they may very well mean that they want more than what they have right now. This by no means indicates that those people the survey calls "the saddest" are in despair or misery (like you would call people in Afghanistan right now). There are also people in this world that are happy with what they have even it is very little materially and have no wish to want more, because they believe that is God's will. It is so unreliable and unfair to measure people's happiness with the same standards.