The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World's Happiest People(10)

So, loneliness is bad for happiness. Mind-blowing, right? More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle pointed out that man is a social animal; and, in the 1940s, Maslow’s pyramid of human needs showed how love and belonging come just after basic safety and physiological needs.





Today, modern happiness research using big data echoes those findings. What the UN World Happiness Report shows us is that roughly three quarters of the difference in the happiness levels between the countries of the world comes down to six factors.

One of them is social support. We will look at the other five in the chapters to come. Social support is measured by asking whether people have somebody they can rely on in times of need. It is a binary and very crude way of measuring it, but we have data on it from around the globe, and it does determine happiness levels.

Fortunately, across the countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), 88 per cent of people believe that they know someone they could rely on in a time of need. People in New Zealand, Iceland and Denmark feel most secure. In these countries, 95 per cent or above believe their friends have their back in times of need, while people in Hungary, Korea and Mexico report the lowest level of confidence with 82, 76 and 75 per cent, respectively.

A couple of years ago, I called my bank to see if I could borrow some money to buy a place to live. When I said that I studied happiness for a living, the man on the other end of the line went awfully quiet. Long story short, I was in my mid-thirties, single, and spent the next couple of months on my friend’s couch with his two cats. You know, living the dream. But I didn’t despair: I knew people had my back.

HAPPINESS TIP:

DO IT LIKE THE DUTCH – CELEBRATE NEIGHBOURS’ DAY

Make the effort to speak to your neighbours. Meet them for a coffee, help them in the shared garden or just stop to chat the next time you see them.

According to a Dutch proverb, it is better to have a good neighbour than a distant friend. Since 2006, the Dutch have celebrated National Neighbours’ Day on 26 May. It started as an initiative to get neighbours together and has grown to become an event which is celebrated in two thousand Dutch districts. It was inspired by a survey which showed that three out of four Dutch people found that neighbourhoods which engaged in regular activities were the most pleasant to live in and was initiated by the Dutch coffee company, Douwe Egberts, to get neighbours together. Later on, Douwe Egberts collaborated with the Oranjefonds, which has since 2008 provided neighbourhoods with funds to celebrate the annual day. Celebrations can range from holding a street party to having a cup of coffee with neighbours you might not usually socialize with. Make a special effort on 26 May next year to say hello to your neighbours, or invite them over for a hot drink.





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BOWLING TOGETHER


Back in 2000, Harvard professor and political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, about the decline of American civil society. Putnam’s diagnosis was that Americans were engaging less and less with their communities and this was damaging American society as a whole.

Americans were far less likely to participate in voluntary work, to go to church, know their neighbours, invite friends home, go to bars, join unions or just spend time hanging out with friends (and their cats).

This is part of the reason why, over the past decades, countries like the US have become richer but have at the same time experienced a drop in happiness levels. Across the world, we seem to be looking for happiness in all the wrong places. To make matters worse, this is not a US thing but a global thing. We – human beings – are happier when we feel connected with others. And, so far, I have yet to discover a more powerful force to explain human happiness than the fulfilment of our longing for love, friendship and community. So, people want to belong, but they are not exactly sure how to make it happen.

This challenge has become even bigger with the advance of technology. We are connecting like never before, yet we still feel alone. Our relationships are complicated, they are demanding and they are messy – so we attempt to clean them up with technology. We prefer calling someone to meeting them in person – and would rather text than call. We are drawn in by the illusion of connection without the demands of intimacy, and while there are positive aspects of social media, for example, keeping in touch when geographically apart, we find that people who reduce their consumption of social media are happier and connect more in the real world.

In 2015, we ran an experiment at the Happiness Research Institute. We asked participants about different dimensions of happiness and then randomly allocated the participants either to a control group, which continued to use Facebook as usual, or a treatment group, which did not use Facebook for a week. When the week had passed, we asked the participants to evaluate their lives once more.

What we found was that the treatment group reported significantly higher levels of life satisfaction. The people in that group also reported higher levels of enjoyment in life and felt less lonely, and not using Facebook led to an increase in their social activity and their satisfaction with their social life. Further study is needed to understand the long-term effects of such an intervention but, for now, it is another piece of evidence demonstrating that, while digital technologies are still in their infancy, we, too, are still in our infancy in terms of our ability to use it. One of the challenges is to organize critical analogue mass at the local community level. By critical analogue mass, I mean enough people that are not sucked into their devices so there is someone to play or talk with. How do we ensure that we have somebody to play with if we disconnect from the digital community? As we shall see below, a Danish school might have found a means to do that.