This week, the analytics firm Gallup released their latest annual report on global emotions. It’s a mammoth undertaking, with 146,000 people surveyed across 142 countries.
The main takeaway of this year's report, with data collected around the globe in 2023, is that the world has rebounded emotionally from the pandemic, with positive emotions - feeling well-rested and respected, laughing and enjoying, and learning something new or interesting - returning to pre-pandemic highs and negative emotions like stress, anger, worry, and sadness declining. It's good to know that humanity is so resilient.
Gallup also highlighted, perhaps surprisingly, that people under 30 are the most positive of all age groups, and were ahead of the pandemic recovery curve: they returned to their pre-pandemic positivity levels a year before everyone else.
If you’d like to up your own positive experiences, consider a move to Latin America or Southeast Asia, the regions where people have the highest positivity scores, both in 2023 and in the past. Paraguay and Panama tied for first, with a score of 86/100; Gallup notes that high scores “strongly relate to people’s perceptions of their living standards, personal freedoms, and the presence of social networks.”
There have been year-on-year changes in individual countries and for individual emotions, but Gallup's report demonstrates just how stable the world’s emotional experience is as a whole.
While there are pockets of the globe where, sadly, deep negativity is the norm, the world is experiencing a lot more positivity on the day-to-day than you might guess, especially if you are taking your cues from the news - other than, of course, OGN Daily.