We have the wealth. We have the education. We have the resources. None of that is making us happy. Why? Because we have yet to accept that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Many know how to make America happy
While many Americans continue to brag about how great we are, others live their greatness with their lifestyle. They are happy which is what everyone wants.
NPR reported the following recently.
As of this writing, the Finns are the happiest people in the world. At least, that’s according to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network — which on Wednesday released its annual rankings of 156 countries, using a statistical model based on a gamut of considerations ranging from their citizens’ healthy life expectancy and income to their governments’ levels of social support and government corruption. This model showed Finland leaping from its fifth-place finish in last year’s report to first.
Don’t cry for Norway, though. The Olympic powerhouse fell no further than second. In fact, this list’s leaders may have shuffled a bit — but, as the report explains, “the top ten positions are held by the same countries as in the last two years.” And that means a very Nordic leaderboard: Of those 10, only Switzerland (5), Canada (7), New Zealand (8) and Australia (10) hail from somewhere other than Europe’s northern reaches.
So is the United States, the country that Trump will make great again doing any better? Not according to the report.
Readers will need to skim a little lower to find the U.S., which dropped four spots from last year’s list to No. 18, just above the U.K. and the United Arab Emirates. In fact, the explanation for the American slide gets an entire chapter in the report. “The U.S. is in the midst of a complex and worsening public-health crisis, involving epidemics of obesity, opioid addiction, and major depressive disorder that are all remarkable by global standards,” writes the chapter’s author, Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development.
Sachs notes that these three epidemics, which are “likely mutually reinforcing,” are exacerbated by high levels of income inequality and a “woefully inadequate” health care system. Other factors, according to Sachs, include corporate deregulation and increasing screen time on new technologies. “The main issue for the U.S. is not the lack of means to address the crises of public health and declining well-being,” he says. “Rather, perhaps the major practical barrier is corporate lobbying that keeps dangerous corporate practices in place and imposes untold burdens on the poor and vulnerable parts of the U.S. population, coupled with the failure of the American political system to address and understand America’s growing social crisis.”
The report busts the U.S. bubble in one sweep. Our plutocracy with its practices is materially hurting its own. But if we keep electing people who continue to fool us, we will continue to get the same results. It is insanity. It is time for America to learn from those who’ve done it and are happier for it.
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