Joy to the world?

The World Happiness Report is out, with a surprising picture of global resilience

In a conclusion that even surprised its editors, the 2021 World Happiness Report found that, amid global hardship, selfreported life satisfaction across 95 countries on average remained steady in 2020 from the previous year.

The United States saw the same trend - despite societal tumult that yielded a national drop in positive emotions and a rise in negative ones. The country fell one spot, to 19th, in the annual rankings of the report, released Saturday.

The report is good news regarding global resilience, experts say.

“I don’t want to leave an impression that all was well, because it’s not,” said one of the report’s editors, Jeffrey Sachs, an economics professor at Columbia University. But while the use of national averages masks individual well-being disparities, Sachs said, the data suggests that “people have not thrown up their hands about their lives.”

The happiness report relies on the Gallup World Poll, which asks respondents to rate their current life satisfaction on a zeroto-10 “ladder” scale, with a 10 representing “the best possible life for you.” It’s a “longer view” of happiness, as Sachs put it, and its steadiness aligns with what other U.S. Gallup polling and some European polling has found during the pandemic.

In late March to early April of 2020, at the beginning of pandemic restrictions, 58.2% of U.S. respondents rated their current life satisfaction as a 7 or above, Gallup found.

While the number of Americans reporting anxiety and depressive symptoms rose sharply over the course of 2020, that satisfaction number stayed fairly even through December, according to the report, even after further covid-19 restrictions, pandemic surges, protests over racial injustices and politics, and a divisive presidential election.

All the while, Americans’ expected future happiness remained high: In five surveys since the pandemic began, between 65.8% and 69.2% of respondents said they expected their life satisfaction to be an 8 or above five years into the future, higher than before the pandemic. That suggests an optimism for the future that Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, says is “really, really adaptive.”

“We have the most massive changes in social behavior we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes happen during this pandemic,” said Lyubomirsky, author of books such as “The Myths of Happiness” and “The How of Happiness.” “And so I would have expected much, much bigger declines in well-being. And we do not see that.”

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one — everyone could use a little bit more happiness these days. Surprisingly, the most recent World Happiness Report found that 95countries reported overall satisfaction with life in 2020on average with the previous year’s findings, despite the life-altering COVID-19 pandemic.