The World's Happiest Countries Most Boring Graph:
But the big story here isn't that the Nordics dominate (duh) or that Costa Rica is shooting up through the ranks, it's that the Anglo countries are collapsing!
The end of the English-speaking peoples empire?The end of the English-speaking peoples empire?
The report draws on surveys by Gallup, a pollster, asking people to rate their lives out of ten. By that measure, nearly twice as many countries have grown happier over the past two decades as have become less so. The English-speaking world is a clear exception: for the second year running, no country in the Anglosphere made the top ten.
These survey(!) results have pretty dubious methods — and honestly the most cynical explanation for the Nordic's happiness result is liberal use of antidepressants... removing/getting the lowest results off your sample has massive effects on the average — but they consistently report the same 5-10 countries (Nordics + NL and Swizterland + Israel) in the top, so they're consistently capturing something.
among under-25s in America, Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, scores have fallen—placing all six among the biggest declines for this age group.
I saw blame the boomers (#1468968, #1476033)... obviously.
Many researchers blame social media: young people’s satisfaction began to slide in the early 2010s, as smartphones and social platforms spread. But the relationship is not straightforward. Social media are widespread everywhere. Countries in Latin America, for example, combine heavy social-media use with surprisingly high levels of cheeriness. Surveys from the region show that platforms built for communication, such as WhatsApp, are associated with higher life satisfaction than algorithm-driven feeds, such as TikTok and X. But teenagers in the Anglosphere use a similar mix of platforms and still fare worse overall.
Don't sleep on CR.
A Joe Nakamoto vid to illustrate the point:
"I didn't join Bitcoin to get rich or anything, that was never the point. It was just a by-product of Satoshi asking me to keep my node running." -- Martti Malmi"I didn't join Bitcoin to get rich or anything, that was never the point. It was just a by-product of Satoshi asking me to keep my node running." -- Martti Malmi
archive: https://archive.md/TboAW
I see that the graph didn't copy over:
It's just English speaking people returning to their heritage: they are only happy when they are miserable. That is the native state of the English, and everyone who speaks the language carries the curse (to some degree).
I thought that was just me
The answer is clearly information warfare. China and Russia have every incentive to target the US with politically divisive bots, and the rest of the anglosphere is caught up in the crossfire
Is their incentive even stronger than American politicians’?
Anger drives donations
UK and the Anglosphere is the beta test for the technology surveillance complex.
Make people miserable, create civil unrest and bring surveillance as the “sweet relief”.
that's at least an innovative, hot take!
I need saunas
Blimey