The Dark Side of Happiness | Meik Wiking | TEDxCopenhagen

so according to the United Nations world happiness report Denmark is the happiest country in the world nevertheless today before the strike of Midnight's somebody in Denmark is going to take his or her own life and another one again tomorrow and the next day this year we will have more than 500 people who kill themselves or three times as many as are killed in traffic now these are the global suicide rates many people mistakenly believe that Denmark has some of the highest rates in the world fortunately that's not true we rank somewhere in the middle but why is the happiest country in the world not at the bottom of the list when it comes to suicide I believe that part of the reason is that it's more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy Society now I study happiness every day I get up and I try to answer one simple question why are some people happier than others it gets me up in the morning but sometimes it also keeps me awake at night I'm told when musicians see musical notes they can hear that music in their mind the same thing happens to me when I look at happiness data I don't hear music but I do hear the comforting sounds of lives we'll lived here the sound of joy the feeling of connectedness and the sense of purpose but I also hear silence I hear the silence of those people that felt that life was not worth living and I fear that their silence might be the dark side of our happiness so today I want to speak up for those that no longer have a voice and today I want you to get to an understanding of why we need to start to address well-being inequality and bridge the gap so together we will look at income jobs loneliness social media and the suicide Happiness paradox but first I want to address the skepticism that I know some of you hope to what's happening for such I saw some of you on the first row smiling when I mentioned I study happiness that's fine but let's all be honest for a second show of hands how many of you are skeptical towards happiness research or our ability to measure happiness all the way up ok so it's around 50% I've seen worse so let's address the issues I mean I'm sure one of your concerns is that we might have different perceptions of what happiness is you might think it's one thing I might think it's another so first we need to acknowledge that happiness is an umbrella term we read different things into it so what we do is we break it down we look at the different components that happiness consists of so when we and the United Nations and the OECD and the different governments we try to measure happiness and we try to quantify quality of life we look at at least three different dimensions first we look at life satisfaction so basically we ask people to take a step back and evaluate their lives how satisfy how satisfied are you all in all or how happy I am on a scale from zero to ten or imagine the best possible life you could lead and the worst possible life you could lead where do you feel you stand right now this is the dimension that Denmark always do well on the second dimension is more about what kind of emotions we experience on an everyday basis so if you take yesterday where you stressed angry worried depressed or did you feel happy did you laugh and did you feel loved of course these two dimensions are linked if you have an everyday which is characterized by a lot of positive emotions you are more likely to experience or report higher levels of life satisfaction this dimension though is much more volatile we can see there is a weekend effect on this one so the third dimension is also called the demonic dimension that's just the ancient Greek word for happiness and it refers to what Aristotle thought happiness was and to him the good life was the meaningful life so people have a sense of purpose so let's take the first dimension and think about what your answer would be if I asked you and don't worry I'm not going to ask you to share it with guy next to you but how happy are you all in all on a scale from zero to ten how happy are you you have a number in mind so what I would do is I would follow you and the rest of the audience and 10,000 people over the next 10 years because over the next decade some of you are going to get a promotion congratulations some of you are going to get fired and some of you are going to find the love of your life and some of you are going to lose someone you love so what I'm interested in is how those changes in your life circumstances impacts your happiness what is the average impact unhappiness from finding love that's what I'm interested in and then it doesn't matter whether you and I have different perceptions of what happiness is now all these questions about happiness and satisfaction and purpose they've been asked and answered a million times across the world and now we can start to see patterns so whether you're from Denmark or the UK or the US or China or India what do happy people have in common that's what we try to find out so basically we use the same methods that have been applied within medicine so for decades we've been studying why do some people live to see 100 and because of those studies we know that smoking alcohol exercise and diet matters when it comes to our life expectancy we try and use the same methods to look at happiness so another issue you might say is happiness is subjective yes happiness is very subjective to me that's not an issue that's a good thing because what I care about is how you experience your life how happy you are nothing you're the best judge and the only expert that can tell me about how it is to walk in your shoes and I think we tend to forget that we study a lot of things that are subjective by nature we look at depression we look at stress we look at anxiety those are also subjective so what happiness at the end of the day it's about how we as individuals feel about our lives and I'm yet to hear convincing argument why happiness should be the one thing that we cannot study in a scientific manner and I think we should because I think is what matters the most okay so let me ask you a different question imagine you could live in one of two worlds in the first world you make $50,000 per year everybody else makes 25 in the second world you make $100,000 per year so twice as much as before but everybody else makes 200,000 our prices are constant so this is Copenhagen a cup of coffee still cost 5 euros but think about it where would you prefer to live where you make 50 everybody else makes 25 or 100 everybody else makes 200 show of hands how many of you would prefer to live in the first world so around 20% that's a little bit a little bit below average but you guys you're weird you're Ted audience on average we see 50% choose the first world and why do we do that why would we want to live in a place where we can consume less the reason is we care not only about absolute income but we care about relative income because we care about our social position social comparisons matter and they impact how we feel about our lives and income is not the only place where we make social comparisons we also make them in our social life now we can all imagine that Christmas must be a difficult time of year if you are lonely but actually according to some studies it's this time of year spring and the upcoming summer that are worse because it's this time of year that you can see people gathering in parks and at the beach for picnics and barbecues in the words of one respondent in one of these surveys he said summer is a nightmare for a lonely person everywhere you go you see people hanging out in the supermarket you see friends shopping for barbecues and picnic and there you are by yourself with a liter of milk in one hand and a rope in the other social comparisons matter and they impact how we feel we can also all imagine that being the odd one out is difficult we also know that unemployment have a devastating effect on our happiness we lose our income we lose our sense of identity we lose some of the relationships we have with coworkers so it's perhaps no surprise that being unemployed is associated with a higher risk of suicide what is surprising is that there is a higher risk of suicide in an area with low unemployment than high unemployment the reason is of course that it might be easier to find a new job where there is low unemployment than high unemployment but there is also a lot more social stigma if you are the only one around unemployed then you're not going to blame the economy then you might start to question yourself social comparisons matter and we see this again and again so because we see this all the time we wanted to do an experiment at the happiness Research Institute we wanted to see how social media affects our perception of reality and how we feel about our lives now every time I log on to Facebook I see people finishing iron Mans and going on perfect vacations and people having this for breakfast this morning I had coffee and a banana it was good but it was not like this so social media is this constant bombardment of great news that happens for everybody else so we wanted to see how that affects us so we got 1,100 people to sign up for our experiment and we ran our surveys on them about happiness and then we randomized them into two groups so one group would continue to do as they usually do our control group and then our treatment group we asked to take a week's break from Facebook then after the week we surveyed both groups again to see the effect and to be honest when we start the experiment I didn't think we would see an effect at all for two reasons first there are so many factors that influence our happiness everything from genetics money where you live who you live with job status your name it secondly if our theory is correct that social media distorts our perception of reality well that's something that has been accumulated over years I'm sure many of you like me have been on Facebook since 2008 so would we really reset that long periods effect by just one week I didn't think so nevertheless what we found was not only did the people who went without Facebook for one week report significantly higher levels of life satisfaction but pretty much every indicator of happiness we had measured was improved now we're yet to understand the long-term effects and study them of this experiment but for now I see it as another piece of evidence that supports the theory that being exposed to other people's happiness can have a negative impact on our that brings us to the suicide Happiness paradox or the notion that happier countries have higher levels of suicide rates now these are the global data every dot here represents a country we look for evidence between life satisfaction and suicide and we don't see any pattern there's no correlation but if we look more closely and we isolate groups within cultures we start to see patterns emerge these are Western countries and here we find a correlation happier countries have slightly higher levels of suicide and if we look even more closely we could take the u.s. and look at the individual states and we find the same pattern happier states have higher suicide rates Hawaii is the second happiest state they have the fifth highest suicide rate adjusted so we find that social comparisons matter we care about our relative income we look at other people when we compare our social life we see that it's harder to face unemployment when you are the only unemployed around and we see that being exposed to other people's happiness can make us question whether life is worth living at all and I think these are all pieces of evidence that it is harder to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society but there is a dark side to our happiness and there are people living in that shadow so that's why I want us to start talking about well-being inequality and bridge that gap and for more than a century we've been talking about economic inequality thanks to the idea of an Italian statistician called G and we know that economic inequality causes crime social unrest and even armed conflict but it's time also to look beyond economic equality and inequality also because when we hear these things that Denmark is the happiest country in the world those rankings are based on averages I really need to look beyond averages because from a ranking point of view it would make equal sense to increase a person from a nine to attend as it would do to increase a person from a one to a two but I believe we have a moral obligation to focus our attention to where well-being is most scarce and bridge the gap now the world happiness report published just three weeks ago state that well-being inequality has a larger negative impact on how we feel about our lives than does economic inequality so that's why my final words are these I think time has come to start addressing well-being inequality and bridge the gap and to take notice there are people that are living in the dark side of our happiness and to honor that noble idea that the best measure of any society is how we treat our most vulnerable citizens and to reconsider whether your breakfast will taste just as good even if you don't post it on Instagram thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 203,387

Rating: 4.8756118 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Denmark, Social Science, Depression, Happiness

Id: PbtzY-8IFTQ

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Tue May 10 2016