The Library
Happiness & Well-Being
13Deaths of Despair vs. Felt Despair
Lay a decade of Gallup feelings over the county map of suicide, drug, and alcohol deaths, and the measure that tracks mortality best is not sadness or worry — it's physical pain, followed by the belief the future holds nothing better.
Does Community Substitute for Connection?
Putnam's heirs promised that civic fabric lifts everyone. Three and a half million Gallup interviews ask the sharper question: does it lift the people who need it most?
Fifty Years of American Evenings
Since 1974 the GSS has asked the same four questions: how often do you spend an evening with relatives, with friends, with neighbors — or at a bar? The answers trace a half-century in which company grew rarer and screens grew brighter.
Happiness Moved Inside Borders
Between 2006 and 2019 the world got happier and nations grew more alike — yet inside 39 of 42 countries, the gap between the happiest and unhappiest citizens widened.
Smiles and Ladders: Where Good Days and Good Lives Come Apart
Rwanda has some of the world's best days and its worst self-rated lives. Lithuania, the reverse. A map of where good days and good lives come apart.
The Loneliness Geography
Loneliness and depression have opposite geographies: one is young, single, and urban; the other is rural and deprived. A ZIP-code-level map of American isolation.
The Plateau Is in the Tail, Not the Mean
The legend that money stops buying happiness at $75,000 was computed on this very survey. Plot the whole distribution of well-being instead of its average, and the plateau moves: it belongs to the unhappiest Americans — and to feelings, not judgments.
The Stress Decade: How the World's Days Got Heavier, 2008–2019
Between 2008 and 2019 — before anyone had heard of COVID-19 — the share of humanity reporting a stressful day rose by ten percentage points. Enjoyment never moved.
The Thin Cushion: Money Softens Few of Life's Blows
Fifty years of American survey data say wealth softens remarkably few of life's blows — and for some, the well-off fall further.
The Two Clocks of Growing Old
As people age, the mind's agitations — stress, anger — fall to lifetime lows, while pain and sadness climb. And whether old age is calm or anxious is sorted, above all, by money.
The U-Curve of Happiness Is Breaking — at the Young End
For two generations, happiness sagged in midlife and recovered with age. In the 2020s the curve snapped at its left end: the young are now the unhappiest Americans.
The U-Curve, Redrawn
The famous U-shaped happiness curve — high in youth, low at midlife, rising again in old age — is real, but mostly a privilege of the rich Anglosphere. Across much of the world, life-evaluation simply falls with age.
What a Year of Life Costs
In Cincinnati, ZIP codes one year of life apart differ by about $18,000 in median home value; in San Francisco, $141,000. The housing market already prices life expectancy.