Poll: Common Traits of America's Happiest People
Monday, 24 April 2023 03:35 PM ED
America’s happiest people value community and close personal relationships as well as a belief in God. They are also generally older. Those are some of the conclusions from the latest Wall Street Journal-NORC poll that found only 12% of Americans describe themselves as “very happy.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, that 12% was the lowest score ever recorded in the nonpartisan and objective research organization NORC at University of Chicago General Social Survey that dates back to 1972. The latest survey of 1,019 adults also found that large majorities felt pessimistic about the economy and prospects for the next generation.
About 30% rated themselves at the lowest level of happiness, stating they were “not too happy.” However, a majority, 56%, of those surveyed said they were “pretty happy.”
The respondents who said they were “very happy” overwhelmingly said they valued strong relationships. Some 67% reported that marriage is very important to them, regardless of their own marital status, compared to 43% of respondents overall.
The very happy people said that belief in God is important to them, and two-thirds described themselves as very to moderately religious, compared to less than half of adults overall. They also felt strongly about community involvement compared to other groups and while they tended to be satisfied with their finances, money wasn’t high on their list of priorities.
“We’re living on Social Security and a couple of small pensions. We live month to month on that,” said 76-year-old Mary Ann DePasquale, a retired medical secretary in Keedysville, Md., one of the very happy people surveyed. “But we don’t want for anything.”
Interestingly, although very happy people say they are distressed by the state of politics in the nation, the group included equal numbers of Trump voters and Biden supporters. This elite was not without challenges, reports the Journal. Some were struggling with children going through a divorce or facing cancer.
During the interviews, the respondents said their happiness was partly due to their personalities, but they also shared one other common trait: fitness. And the very happy tended to be older. People ages 60 and older accounted for 30% in the survey but 44% of the happiest group.
Women in the Journal-NORC survey were far more likely than men to describe themselves as very happy. These findings make sense to Dr. Robert J. Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School who conducts ongoing research on the topic of happiness.
“As we get older and realize that death is a real thing, rather than making us depressed, it makes us put a priority on well-being,” he said. Since women tend to live longer than men, this could be the reason they are more likely to fall into the very happy category.
Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which began in 1938 and is still going strong 85 years later, found that robust social connections are what make people happier and physically healthier. Researchers tracked the lives of 724 men from their teenage years to old age and found the most powerful indicator of success and happiness doesn’t lie in our genes, wealth, social class, or IQ. The results of the study clearly show that people who nurture good relationships lead happier and healthier lives.
It's not necessarily about being married or living with someone, since people can be lonely in a marriage and thrive by living alone. But what is important is to have friends and loved ones you can talk with and rely on at all hours of the day or night, say the Harvard researchers.
“No one is happy all the time, and every life includes times of struggle and challenge. Strong relationships help us weather the storm of unhappy times,” Waldinger previously told Newsmax.
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