Work, loneliness and hunger: a recipe for an unhappy world
The global polling company Gallup has tracked a global decline in contentment over the past 15 years.
Bad workplaces, global loneliness and food hunger are behind record levels of unhappiness across the world, says Jon Clifton, global chief executive of the Gallup polling organisation.
Since the company began surveying emotions in 2006, levels of unhappiness – an umbrella term covering anger, stress, sadness, physical pain and worry — have escalated.
In 2021, Gallup found Australia was 72nd in a list of 122 countries in terms of “negative emotions” in the population, where No. 1, Afghanistan, was the most unhappy and Kazakhstan, at 122, the happiest.
Mr Clifton’s recent book, Blind Spot: The global rise of unhappiness and how leaders missed it, analyses Gallup’s World Poll, which has been collecting data for 100 years and now covers more than 150 countries.
He said in Sydney on Monday that a key reason why we were unhappy was that we were lonely.
“There are 300 million adults globally who live in total loneliness where they don’t interact with a single family or friend,” he said. “It’s not just the amount of friendships, it’s the quality of friendship, so we are finding 20 per cent don’t have anyone they can rely on in times of need.
“It’s no longer an exaggeration to say loneliness is killing people.”
He said while the world had been winning the war against hunger for 40 years, this had switched in 2014 and the world had been getting significantly hungrier, with a rise from 20 per cent to more than 30 per cent in people now suffering moderate to severe food insecurity. This trend had started before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
The third reason why people were unhappy was the workplace. Of people with full-time jobs, “20 per cent are thriving, but 60 per cent are quietly quitting and 20 per cent are downright miserable. This is a massive issue.”
Gallup recently began a research project with Meta (Facebook) to understand the causes of loneliness and whether social media exacerbated those trends.
“Do people feel less connected, even though arguably more connected? We’re not entirely sure,” Mr Clifton said.
After people entered the workforce, he said, the workplace was the single most important place where they could make friends throughout their lives. Despite overwhelming data indicating friendships were good for productivity, leaders had still not embraced or welcomed friendships in the workplace, he said.
Mr Clifton said leaders had not recognised the rise in global unhappiness and it’s connections with political decisions made by electors. “The decisions we make in life are often non-rational,” he said, although he is wary of blaming a rise in civil unrest in places like the US on unhappiness.
“Whether those are directly connected is one thing,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say a rise in negative emotions and a rise in civil unrest are totally disconnected.”
While some academic work argued there was a connection between a rise in negative emotions and a rise in populist parties or authoritarian leaders, Mr Clifton was “not sure I would go so far as to say that. What I would say is when people become very frustrated with their lives, and you couple that with the perception that corruption is widespread, it creates an environment for some sort of change to take place, for some sort of opposing party to whatever the establishment is in a particular country (to emerge).
“We’ve seen massive rises in the perception of corruption in both business and in government in a number of countries.
“It doesn’t have to be that way. In Nordic countries, overwhelming majorities don’t say they think corruption is widespread (there). Governments need to be focused on this because you create an awful cocktail in a society when people don’t feel they have the opportunity to get great work, mix it in with hunger, and it exacerbates a perception the system is working against them.
“That’s when you see negative emotions starting to spiral and people act on those emotions.”
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