New High of 90% of Americans Satisfied with Personal Life

[happytoexplain]

"Satisfaction with personal life" will have very different implications for different people to the point of being useless. I feel underpaid and am unspeakably sad about the ways in which my society is declining, but I would answer "yes, extremely" if somebody asked if I was satisfied with my "personal" life. I think there are other people in my exact same position and with my exact same level of happiness who would answer differently if asked this specific question.

[datashow]

> "Satisfaction with personal life" will have very different implications for different people to the point of being useless.

Of course "satisfaction with personal life", like many things in survey, can have very different implications for different people. But it does not necessarily make it being useless.

You could ask more questions about people specific satisfactions with personal life, it does not make the general sense of satisfaction with personal life useless.

[auiya]

With student debt levels approaching the astronomical, and default rates escalating proportionately, I think we generally just have our heads in the sand about how absolutely wrecked we're about to become later on. So "sure, or course everything is great"... for now.

[Erlich_Bachman]

But do we have a better estimate for things like happiness? Than questionnaires?

[2bitencryption]

I wonder what the difference is between this poll and this other poll from last month, with a writeup by the same author:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/276503/happiness-not-quite-wide...

EDIT: It seems the primary difference is in the question:

Asking "are you satisfied with your personal life" garners much more of an enthusiastic response than "are you happy", apparently?

[93po]

I'm satisfied but it's only because I make more than twice the median household income by myself with no kids and can work remotely at an easy job. I don't know how 90% is satisfied with so much less.

[hastes]

Because median household income is on the rise, jobless rates in females are on decline, 8+ million Americans off food stamp dependence, and consumer confidence is at an 18 year high.

People outside of Silicon Valley and Seattle really need to understand that this number is so high not only because of them (like me and you in this case, having great jobs and being single) but also because the average American worker in Buhl, Idaho is seeing their wages increase and their quality of life get better.

[bob33212]

Super rich Hollywood people can't understand how you are happy without hanging out with models and celebrities at your Oceanview house.

[blowski]

Good for you, it’s great to hear. I _love_ being a parent, and I love working in an open-plan office, so it’s great that we can both be happy despite wanting different things from life. Maybe the common thread is being paid well, but even then, I know people on minimum wage that seem very satisfied.

[kube-system]

Other studies have shown that happiness does not increase with income after the point at which people can afford to be comfortable.

Consider Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: income can help you with several parts of the hierarchy, but it cannot buy all of them.

[war1025]

Satisfaction is largely a relative thing. People notice if their situation is improving / staying the same / getting worse. They don't so much care about their absolute ranking in society.

[jliptzin]

Because it’s always about change in income, not absolute numbers. I guarantee you someone who went from making $50k to $100k in a year will report being happier than a guy who made a steady $1m each year.

[starpilot]

The first thing you list is money. For others, it would be family, friends.

[smileysteve]

This seems to contradict the opioid and suicide epidemics that reduced the American life expectancy statistic; But is a welcome change.

[ravenstine]

I have my doubts in people's ability to assess their own emotions. I'm fairly conscientious, but I often have trouble boiling down my thoughts and feelings into simple words like "happy" or "satisfied". If I were asked if I'm satisfied with my personal life, I'd say yes, but only because saying I'm dissatisfied is negative and gets interpreted the wrong way. People assume too much and make judgments when you give them even the slightest hint that not everything is perfect with you. Life is too complicated for me to actually satisfied or dissatisfied.

[dhdejejdhfyx]

I feel like there's too many "I" and "me" statements here to substantiate the conclusion that people at large can't assess their own emotions.

[acephal]

"Tepid satisfaction"?

[simmanian]

If everyone is satisfied, what then is everyone chasing after all the time?

[Jach]

Having something to chase is part of being satisfied.

[Moodles]

I understand the topic is naturally political, but it would be nice to see discussions not super political bashing Trump vs Clinton and so on. A lot of the comments I see here are pretty subjective, anecdotal and emotional. I really don't like seeing this on Hacker News.

Note in the article it says: "WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Nine in 10 Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in their personal life, a new high in Gallup's four-decade trend. The latest figure bests the previous high of 88% recorded in 2003."

In 2003 there were a lot of issues too. 9/11 recently happened, some wars in the Middle East... So why not read the actual article? They try to go into details as to why people are feeling happier. E.g.

"Household income, political party affiliation and marital status are associated with the largest subgroup differences in Americans' satisfaction with their personal life . Roughly 95% of Americans who live in high-income households, who identify as Republicans and who are married say they are satisfied with their personal life -- and about three in four among each of these groups are very satisfied.

Meanwhile, adults in low-income households are the least likely to say they are satisfied with their life, followed by Democrats and unmarried adults. Among each of these groups, small majorities report being very satisfied. Low-income Americans hold the distinction of having the lowest percentage very satisfied

It's likely no coincidence that Americans' heightened satisfaction with their personal life comes as confidence in the U.S. economy and their personal finances are also at long-term or record highs."

The article even talks about races and genders, which again is correlated with income. Being married too. So presumably this happiness is in large part due to the economic boom of late. The article even concludes with this. Comments here can say the question is ambiguous or people don't know how they feel themselves all they want, but the evidence, and just plain intuition, strongly suggests it has a lot to do with the economy. People reeeeaaaallllyy care about bread on the table for their family, not tweets from the president, or the "political climate", or Bad Thing X, or any of the other comments here.

I fully expect downvotes, but hey ho, that's emotional politics for you. What I've actually written should be pretty non-controversial honestly: TL,DR; "People care about family and bread on the table a lot".

[thrower123]

Somewhere on Twitter that I can't find, this survey was charted back into the 1970s. The lowest the positive response was reported was during stagflation, oil embargo, post-Vietnam years, and it was in the 70%.

[daachi]

Based on 0.0003099022% of the population. Sure thing, I believe this.

[philk10]

This Is Fine - https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/5/11592622/this-is-fine-meme...

[mistrial9]

Dog House Fire meme worked

[shadow-banned]

This cannot be accurate. I've traveled the midwest, and so many are miserable. I don't buy this at all.

[hastes]

Anecdotal at best.. your experience meeting maybe upwards of 50 people across the midwest cannot possibly be taken with the same consideration as a major polling outlet with 2500x the reach.

[2bitencryption]

It's a Gallup poll - do you have better information than Gallup?

[headcanon]

Despite what you see on the news and Twitter, we're no more "fascist" today than we were 10 or even 50 years ago. Federal politics and culture wars make the biggest splash in the headlines but who the President is, what party is in charge, or whatever happens in DC really doesn't affect 90% of people's lives on a day-to-day basis. What does is even deeper and more systemic than the retail politics we see.

[satisfaction]

Most of us just want to enjoy life. For the vast majority of Americans this does not involve becoming rich, enjoyment comes from family and the time we spend together, it's not about fancy degrees and nice material things. There will always be an ebb and flow of opportunity, sometimes there is enough opportunity that a larger than average number of American families earn large disposable incomes, those are great times. Just remember that we are still very religious and are brought up from a young age to be happy with what you have, not upset about what you don't have.

[snapetom]

Because they're incredibly loaded, and frankly, idiotic questions. It's an anonymous poll put on by Gallup. No one would feel pressured to answer a pollster question one way or another. And "more fascist society?" Do you honestly think the US is alone in this?

[blowski]

Why are all these comments so grumpy? “People are happy? What on earth is wrong with them?”

The awful political situation right now has encouraged me to spend less time keeping up with news, and to spend more time reading classic literature. So, thanks to Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, I am feeling more satisfied with life - just not in the way you’d assume if I just said “I’m happy in my personal life”.

[happytoexplain]

This is dismissive and insulting. Justified or not, the people you're referring to are clearly incredulous that the poll accurately measures happiness, not that they think there is something wrong with being happy.

[dylan604]

Do we really trust the results of polls anymore? After the 2016 election where all of the polls showed Hillary winning the election, I just don't trust them at all.

It's almost like people are treating polls like SPAM calls, and just tell them anything to keep them on the line as long as possible intentionally giving bogus answers.

[SpicyLemonZest]

We shouldn't treat the results of polls as gospel truth, but we should trust them more than we trust our intuitive sense of what's gotta be true. A poll showing 90% of Americans are satisfied with their personal life is a pretty strong refutation of claims like "suchandsuch trend has propelled America to unknown depths of misery", even accounting for the possibility of bias.

[ianai]

Agree. We’re living with every choice being polled and chosen by those polls. There’s nothing worse for any policy than a bad poll. Unless it’s the seeming acceptance of around 43% being a majority for some.

Edit-it’s always worth considering the error bars on polls. News will gladly say A is preferred to B when their difference is well within error bars.

[datashow]

The 2016 poll was not off, what was wrong is the prediction models which did not take account of electoral college sufficiently. Poll and prediction are two very different things.

[wostusername]

No pre-election analysis had Trump at 0%. Unlikely outcomes happen.

If I put two blue marbles and one red marble in a bag and ask you to blindly draw one, you probably won't be too shocked if you end up drawing the red one. Yet if it happens in an election everybody starts suddenly claiming all polling and statistics are useless.

[war1025]

> After the 2016 election where all of the polls showed Hillary winning the election

The actual analysis of the polls showed Trump was well within striking distance of Hillary. People just didn't want to hear that.

[lunias]

This has got to be fake right? Economic disparity, environmental uncertainty, political nonsense. Either the people surveyed are completely tuned out and just glad to be able to watch Netflix all day or mass-shootings are a new way of expressing how personally happy you are.