Is Progress Making Us Miserable?

Tim Lomas joins Chelsea Follett to explore surprising global trends in happiness, meaning, mental health, and more.

There’s a longstanding and counterintuitive finding in global happiness research: the richest countries don’t always report being the happiest, and rising wealth doesn’t necessarily lead to higher life satisfaction.

More disconcertingly, people in wealthy nations—especially younger generations— seem to be experiencing rising rates of anxiety and depression.

What should we make of this paradox?

In this episode of The Human Progress Podcast, psychology researcher Tim Lomas joins Chelsea Follett to discuss his research on global human flourishing and what it reveals about the relationship between economic development and well-being.

---

---

Below is an edited and abridged transcript featuring some highlights from the interview.

---

Joining me today is Tim Lomas, a psychology research scientist at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. He joins the podcast today to discuss the Global Flourishing Study.

Could you start us off by just telling us a little bit about this study and what questions it contains?

The two masterminds behind the study are Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, and Byron Johnson at the Baylor Institute for the Study of Religion. Around six years ago, they hatched this incredibly ambitious plan to do a global study of flourishing.

There are lots of international studies of well-being. The Gallup World Poll, for example, has been around for 20 years, covering some 150 countries. However, one issue with that study is that it’s cross-sectional: it’s a snapshot of people each year. It doesn’t track people over time, so it can’t really tell us about causal trends or patterns other than at the international level. Our study takes a set of people and follows them over time.

In 2023, we did the first wave of data collection from over 200,000 people. 2024 was wave two, so we now have two waves of data. Wave three has just gone into the field. The plan has been for it to go on for at least five years.

The heart of the study is a questionnaire covering different aspects of flourishing. It’s centered around a framework with five main domains of flourishing plus an additional sixth one. So the five main domains are happiness and life satisfaction, health, both physical and mental, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. The additional sixth dimension is financial and material stability. That’s not exactly an end in itself like the others, but it’s pretty important for securing those other domains. There are also questions on religion, spirituality, society, government, relationship to nature, and some that are harder to categorize, such as experiences of beauty connected to nature.

There are some well-known issues with self-reported data. There are the issues of subjectivity, individual interpretation, and differing cultural norms. So, we need to interpret this data very cautiously and ideally alongside some more objective metrics. That said, it’s still really interesting, and some of the insights are very counterintuitive.

Let’s start by examining more of these different domains. Can you tell me about the different main domains and why they were selected?

The domains were selected by Tyler VanderWeele on the basis of being prominent in the literature, as well as just making intuitive sense. Most of the attention in the literature has been on those first two domains: happiness, life satisfaction, and health. Obviously, for health, there are plenty of objective metrics.

When it comes to happiness and life satisfaction, it’s hard to find objective metrics, and there are lots of nuances to get into. One of the papers I’ve been leading compares life evaluation with life satisfaction and with happiness. These concepts all seem very similar and are sometimes even used synonymously, but there are actually considerable and intriguing differences between them. But I would say those two domains have been very well covered. Close social relationships are also a big focus of attention.

The other two main domains, character and virtue, and meaning and purpose, have had much less attention, but we think that they’re integral to human flourishing. If you score highly in the other domains but don’t have a sense of character and virtue, or meaning and purpose, then your life could feel hollow or superficial.

The sixth dimension, financial material stability, is fairly well studied. In a lot of our analyses, we seek to combine the self-report data with objective metrics, and that can be interesting. For example, incorporating something like GDP per capita creates some very strange and perplexing patterns.

Absolutely. That was one of the interesting points to me. The countries that score the highest are not necessarily the ones that you would expect based purely on material standard of living. Many of the countries that score very high, like Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines, are middle-income countries. They’re not very rich, but they are experiencing a high growth rate. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that.

I really love your insight about trajectory. I’ll start with a caveat relating to what you mentioned about cultural and linguistic differences.

To give you an example, Japan is at the bottom of a lot of the rankings. And Japan is clearly an economically developed nation. I’ve been there a few times and I love the place. You walk around thinking, this is an amazing society. And then when you see this data, you think, “am I missing something as an outsider, or are there cultural differences that I’m not picking up on?” There is a suggestion in the literature that Japan and other cultures in that region might have more pressure to be self-effacing. So, the question arises, does that account for their relatively low scores? My sense is that would account for some of it.

That is just a general caveat about the task of comparing cultures. That said, you can still see some meaningful patterns, and I think you’re right, the countries that seem to do very well in terms of flourishing are not the most economically developed countries. And then one might wonder whether development comes at the expense of other aspects of flourishing, like societal cohesion, community structure, traditions, religion and spirituality, and social connections.

The lesson here isn’t that societies shouldn’t develop economically because that’s a vital component of flourishing. The question is how to develop economically without sacrificing those other domains. That’s really the key question we’re trying to think through.

I also want to touch upon your point about the trajectory. One’s sense of how well one’s life is or how well one’s society is doing is not static. It’s based on where it’s been and where it’s going. I can imagine two countries that are almost identical in terms of their current state, but one is on a downward trajectory, and the other is getting better. My sense of which society is better might be the one that’s improving. So even if those countries may not be as developed economically, the people in those countries sense they’re on this upward trajectory, and that positive sentiment is reflected in their flourishing scores.

I’ve seen completely unrelated studies that show something similar happening with age. In most countries, almost all of them, actually, older people have more positive reports across many domains than younger people. I wonder if that might have to do with the greater perspective that older people have, especially if they’ve seen a lot of positive economic change in their lifetime. What do you think about that?

I think that’s a really key point. There is this striking trend where satisfaction, happiness, and even flourishing generally are somewhat U-shaped over lifetimes: they are relatively high in the young, then they fall to their lowest level around middle age, and then they rise again as people get older, though it tends to fall off as people get very old. This U-shaped pattern is well corroborated, although now the left-hand side of the U is starting to come down into a kind of J-shaped curve, where older people are doing even better than younger people, with the lowest level still in middle age.

You can even see this with self-reported health. Objectively, the younger person is going to be in better health than an older person, but it’s a question of relative judgement. Do you feel like you’re doing okay relative to where you expect to be, or to your peers, or to people in the past?

This emerging J-shaped pattern is also kind of worrying in terms of what it shows about the well-being of young people. Perhaps younger people today are facing significant challenges that weren’t faced by people of a similar age in earlier generations. Things around the climate, the economics of AI, and the future of work. You can imagine there are so many issues on young people’s minds that could be weighing them down.

Absolutely, though every generation has its challenges. My parents’ generation had to hide under their desks in drills out of fear that a nuclear weapon could fall on them. I think something that has changed is the perspective people have. At Human Progress, we believe that many people lack historical perspective, and it’s important to show them longitudinal data about how things have changed.

That brings me to mental health. The United States is not scoring as well on self-reported mental health as a lot of countries that are economically worse off. For example, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt all seem to have what you call a surplus in this domain of mental health.

I wonder if people in wealthy countries have become much more fragile or sensitive in this domain. With growing acceptance of mental health struggles, you might even get a social reward for saying that you have anxiety or for ranking your mental health poorly. So I wonder how much we can really make of some of these comparisons.

You could imagine that in certain cultures, and maybe the US is one example, certain states of mind or experiences are more likely to be medicalized, and in other countries, perhaps less so. There’s been so much work around the therapization and medicalization of ordinary life, not just in the United States, the tendency to take ordinary struggles and see them through a mental illness lens. I can see certain incentives for using mental illness as a badge of identity, let’s say.

There’s also evidence that technology plays a role. Not technology per se, but the way in which it’s used, certain apps and so on. You could imagine that in certain cultures, perhaps the more economically developed ones, those risk factors could be more prevalent. Progress always has a dialectic; it brings good things and bad things. So countries with less economic development could have less opportunity to benefit from the gains, but also less exposure to the risks.

Another factor you mentioned is voluntary community life. Group activities, both secular and religious, seem to be associated with greater flourishing. Even after controlling for other well-known predictors, it seems like some of the best support systems for human flourishing, as measured by this study, are these bottom-up systems of voluntary communities, civil society, and religious organizations.

Walk me through some of your findings there.

Yeah, I think they’re so important. Close social connections and social institutions are both strong predictors of happiness and life satisfaction, and key aspects of flourishing themselves.

You’re often asked with studies like this, what can people do to improve their well-being? Many aspects of life are out of our control, but one thing that is within our control is trying to find community. Some groups can be more conducive to flourishing than others, but as a general principle, joining communities and organizations is a powerful route to flourishing.

I also think that at least part of the counterintuitive relationship between economic development and flourishing is that development can come at the expense of traditional communities and groups. The takeaway here is that economic development alone is not sufficient; we should also try to preserve things like community, tradition, social structures, and close social relationships, and try to learn lessons from countries that seem to be doing that.

One of the factors that a lot of the literature has looked at is a sense of agency or an internal locus of control. People who are high agency, who feel that they do have more control over their lives, often report higher well-being across a whole range of dimensions.

Do you see that trend in this study as well?

We do. Now, when we ask about agency, it’s more at a societal level. We’re asking people, “Can people in your society trust each other? Can you trust the government? Is there corruption? Do people in your country have the freedom to do X?”

So, agency as freedom from coercive institutions, freedom to pursue one’s own ends economically, religiously, and so on. And we do find a strong correlation between this kind of structural agency and flourishing.