A Study Finds Americans Unrelentingly Cheerful
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/13/AR2006021302145_pf.html
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 14, 2006; A02
"What's happiness anyway?"
Say what?
We've got Raoul Felder, celebrity divorce attorney for the serially separated, on the telephone and he's taking issue with a big new survey on happiness, which among other findings states that married Americans are more blissful than the unmarried by a ratio of almost 2 to 1.
"All these people talking themselves into being happy about marriage -- it's mass delusion," Felder says with the certainty of a man who has become rich working the marital exit door.
Not that Felder fancies himself a sour lemon. "People who get divorced are very hopeful," he says. "They want to get happier."
So it goes with happiness, which in a new Pew Research Center report -- "Are We Happy Yet?" -- appears to be a smiley-face American birthright. Eighty-four percent of Americans describe themselves as either "pretty happy" or "very happy."
They've been relentlessly cheery for decades. The Pew report, released yesterday, comes with a chart known as the "Happiness Trend Line," which reveals barely a ripple since 1972. (For careful students of the inexplicable, the percentage of "very happy" Americans seems to peak slightly in the mid-1970s, which coincided with a presidential impeachment, the fall of Saigon, a fuel crisis and a deep recession).
The polling data slice and dice the happy and the not very, and why they are and where they live and how much they make.
So we find, aphorisms aside, that Americans are convinced that more money makes for more happiness. "Reported happiness rises in a nearly straight line through eight levels of annual family income," Pew reports.
A gilded euphoria sets in above $150,000, as fully 50 percent of respondents insist they are oh-so-"very happy." Does that trendline continue to arc upward? Are billionaires a gigglier group than mere millionaires? More data are needed.
"It's fine to say happiness is a state of mind," says Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor who studies his city's upper classes with an anthropologist's eye. "But it's a lot easier to have that state of mind if it's accompanied by big income."
What else? Dog and cat owners are equally happy, but no more so than the petless. Republicans and churchgoers have more pep in the step than Democrats and those who prefer to sleep late on Sunday.
White evangelical Protestants report they are happiest: 43 percent say they are very happy. Thirty-eight percent of churchgoing Catholics report being "very happy."
Thirty-six percent of whites and 34 percent of Hispanics report they are very happy. Both groups report being happier in greater numbers than do African Americans, of whom 28 percent report being very happy.
Geography plays a role. City folks and sweater-clad Northerners are grumpier than Sunbelters, who are happy except perhaps during hurricane season.
But one might ask: What is happiness anyway? And can we believe all these grinning people?
"Not too many people want to admit to a pollster that they are unhappy and failures," said Darrin M. McMahon, a professor at Florida State University who, as it happens, has written a book on the subject, "Happiness: A History."
"That said, the people who study subjective well-being will tell you that most people are pretty happy," McMahon added.
The mechanics of happiness is not entirely clear. Perhaps the prescription desk of the local CVS is of assistance. But most speculation centers on Darwinian imperatives. For early man to roam the veldt in pursuit of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers required a certain wacky optimism.
"Man needed to be upbeat to keep going," McMahon noted. "And all species need to be happy enough to reproduce."
Medieval man looked at plagues and beheadings, the sacking of cities and too-random massacres and concluded not unreasonably that heaven surely held more promise. The modern notion of happiness as an earthly reward was born of the 18th-century Enlightenment.
"That's when happiness became an assumed entitlement of all human beings," McMahon said. "Unfortunately, that puts a great deal of pressure on us."
Professed optimism is a very American inheritance. Europeans tend, in poll after poll, to take a darker-hued view of the world. As the Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman remarked: "Happiness is good health and a bad memory."
Americans prefer to groove on Bobby McFerrin, who sang: "Don't worry. Be happy."
President John F. Kennedy helped defuse the Cuban missile crisis by taking a look at two contradictory communications from the Russians -- one hopeful, the other apocalyptic -- and deciding to respond to the upbeat one.
The Pew Research Center did a worldwide poll, asking people in 45 nations to place themselves on the ladder of life. "Broadly speaking, the United States and Canada placed themselves very high," said Paul Taylor, an executive vice president at Pew.
There is finally the question of callow youth, the very image of happy hedonism. Turns out codgers are happier by a substantial margin. The Pew Poll shows a 15-percentage-point "happiness gap" between men 65 and older and men 18 to 29.
Once again, Felder, the divorce-lawyer realist, expresses no surprise.
"Come on, you're in a wheelchair or on a walker, what choice do you have?" he said. "You might as well be happy because you don't have a choice of the hot tomatoes, do you?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/13/AR2006021302145_pf.html
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 14, 2006; A02
"What's happiness anyway?"
Say what?
We've got Raoul Felder, celebrity divorce attorney for the serially separated, on the telephone and he's taking issue with a big new survey on happiness, which among other findings states that married Americans are more blissful than the unmarried by a ratio of almost 2 to 1.
"All these people talking themselves into being happy about marriage -- it's mass delusion," Felder says with the certainty of a man who has become rich working the marital exit door.
Not that Felder fancies himself a sour lemon. "People who get divorced are very hopeful," he says. "They want to get happier."
So it goes with happiness, which in a new Pew Research Center report -- "Are We Happy Yet?" -- appears to be a smiley-face American birthright. Eighty-four percent of Americans describe themselves as either "pretty happy" or "very happy."
They've been relentlessly cheery for decades. The Pew report, released yesterday, comes with a chart known as the "Happiness Trend Line," which reveals barely a ripple since 1972. (For careful students of the inexplicable, the percentage of "very happy" Americans seems to peak slightly in the mid-1970s, which coincided with a presidential impeachment, the fall of Saigon, a fuel crisis and a deep recession).
The polling data slice and dice the happy and the not very, and why they are and where they live and how much they make.
So we find, aphorisms aside, that Americans are convinced that more money makes for more happiness. "Reported happiness rises in a nearly straight line through eight levels of annual family income," Pew reports.
A gilded euphoria sets in above $150,000, as fully 50 percent of respondents insist they are oh-so-"very happy." Does that trendline continue to arc upward? Are billionaires a gigglier group than mere millionaires? More data are needed.
"It's fine to say happiness is a state of mind," says Mitchell Moss, a New York University professor who studies his city's upper classes with an anthropologist's eye. "But it's a lot easier to have that state of mind if it's accompanied by big income."
What else? Dog and cat owners are equally happy, but no more so than the petless. Republicans and churchgoers have more pep in the step than Democrats and those who prefer to sleep late on Sunday.
White evangelical Protestants report they are happiest: 43 percent say they are very happy. Thirty-eight percent of churchgoing Catholics report being "very happy."
Thirty-six percent of whites and 34 percent of Hispanics report they are very happy. Both groups report being happier in greater numbers than do African Americans, of whom 28 percent report being very happy.
Geography plays a role. City folks and sweater-clad Northerners are grumpier than Sunbelters, who are happy except perhaps during hurricane season.
But one might ask: What is happiness anyway? And can we believe all these grinning people?
"Not too many people want to admit to a pollster that they are unhappy and failures," said Darrin M. McMahon, a professor at Florida State University who, as it happens, has written a book on the subject, "Happiness: A History."
"That said, the people who study subjective well-being will tell you that most people are pretty happy," McMahon added.
The mechanics of happiness is not entirely clear. Perhaps the prescription desk of the local CVS is of assistance. But most speculation centers on Darwinian imperatives. For early man to roam the veldt in pursuit of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers required a certain wacky optimism.
"Man needed to be upbeat to keep going," McMahon noted. "And all species need to be happy enough to reproduce."
Medieval man looked at plagues and beheadings, the sacking of cities and too-random massacres and concluded not unreasonably that heaven surely held more promise. The modern notion of happiness as an earthly reward was born of the 18th-century Enlightenment.
"That's when happiness became an assumed entitlement of all human beings," McMahon said. "Unfortunately, that puts a great deal of pressure on us."
Professed optimism is a very American inheritance. Europeans tend, in poll after poll, to take a darker-hued view of the world. As the Swedish-born actress Ingrid Bergman remarked: "Happiness is good health and a bad memory."
Americans prefer to groove on Bobby McFerrin, who sang: "Don't worry. Be happy."
President John F. Kennedy helped defuse the Cuban missile crisis by taking a look at two contradictory communications from the Russians -- one hopeful, the other apocalyptic -- and deciding to respond to the upbeat one.
The Pew Research Center did a worldwide poll, asking people in 45 nations to place themselves on the ladder of life. "Broadly speaking, the United States and Canada placed themselves very high," said Paul Taylor, an executive vice president at Pew.
There is finally the question of callow youth, the very image of happy hedonism. Turns out codgers are happier by a substantial margin. The Pew Poll shows a 15-percentage-point "happiness gap" between men 65 and older and men 18 to 29.
Once again, Felder, the divorce-lawyer realist, expresses no surprise.
"Come on, you're in a wheelchair or on a walker, what choice do you have?" he said. "You might as well be happy because you don't have a choice of the hot tomatoes, do you?"