Feeling Good For Now?
By Mitch Berg
Bob Collins at NewsCut notes:
Fortunately, we’ve got The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. It’s based on interviews of more than 100,000 people and it, shows that 47 percent of Americans are struggling and 4 percent are suffering. Forty-nine percent of respondents are reported to be thriving based on a personal assessment of how they feel about their lives at the time of the survey, and where they think they’ll be in five years.
The survey is done every day and Gallup says it will do it for the next 25 years.
I would love to see the final results – especially broken down by things like religious outlook, politics, family status, favorite baseball team…
Findings so far indicate that peoples’ workplaces and any health problems are the two major contributors to whether people are happy.
From the article about the survey:
James Harter is Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being. He said he was particularly surprised by the double whammy of a negative work environment plus a disease condition. And despite knowing the national statistics, he was still surprised to find that two-thirds of working adults were overweight or obese.
So what’s the good news? Social time with friends and family is a buffer for the stress caused by most factors, he said.
“The more you have, the better,” Harter said. He suggested that a graph showing Americans’ overall happiness – which rises sharply on the weekends and drops during the week – may be due in part to the increased social time most people have on the weekends, especially those who work during the week.
I know that among the most miserable times in my life were the ones where I was working at awful jobs – nightclub DJ, some technical writing gigs, Information Architect at a large local bank…
Oh, and what do you think your life is going to be like in five years.
Every time I’ve ever tried to guess that – as my Twenty Years Ago Today series pretty well shows – I’ve been dismally, or sometimes pleasantly, wrong.
