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Happiness versus unhappiness

Mahar Mang ah as
THE March 2008 Social Weather Survey, using a standard scale of many countries, found 34% of adult Filipinos Very Happy, 46% Fairly happy, 16% not very happy, and 3.6% not at all happy.
Conventionally, the upper two categories are happy and the lower two are unhappy. Thus happiness and unhappiness get measured at the same time. Out of every five adult Filipinos, four are happy and one is not. That is probably a little over the world average, for those who go for international contests. For me, what matters more is progress over time.
It so happens that the timetrend for happy Filipinos is flat. The percentage started at 84 in July 1991. In 16 SWS surveys over 1991-2008, it ranged between 76 in August 2005, and 92 in April 1996.
With three scores in the '70s, 12 in the '80s, and one in the '90s, it is clear that happiness is not a problem for most adult Filipinos.
Wouldn't it be more meaningful to keep track of unhappiness instead? The unhappy minority are not so few — 8 million Not Very Happy, and 2 million not at all happy, or a total of 10 million. That's a significant number to worry about, if such people deserve the collective worry' of society.
The key issue is whether unhappiness is only a personal concern, or whether it is also a social concern, like hunger or poverty. The reason hunger and poverty are social concerns is that they are painful and harmful not only to the hungry’and the poor, but also to the entire society.
Virtually everyone accepts that the government, in behalf of society, should aim to eradicate hunger
and poverty. Thus, the regular tracking of hunger and poverty is essential. (But targeting is not sufficient; aiming an unloaded gun is of no use.) But why should the government also aim to eradicate unhappiness? Surely it already has other more important things to do.
Unhappiness due to hunger. In the first quarter of2008, as reported last May 5 by SWS, 15.7 per cent of families suffered from hunger — broken down into 12.5 points 'moderately hungry,' and 3.2 points'severely hungry.’
Unhappiness was 38% within the severely hungry, 29% within the moderately hungry, and 17% within the non-hungry -- from a special tabulation by Clarence MaganoofSWS.
One might also say that hunger was 24.8% among the unhappy, compared to only 13.4% among the happy, except that it is more reasonable to call hunger a cause of unhappiness than the other way around.
Unhappiness due to poverty. There is also a connection between poverty and unhappiness, but it is not as strong a determin antas hunger.
Among families that rated themselves as food-poor, unhappiness was 26 percent in March 2008. Among those that rated themselves as poor in general (which is less harsh than food-poor), unhappiness was smaller, at 23%. Both numbers are above the national unhappiness of 19%; they make sense.
In poor families, the happiness percentage in March 2008 was 77, only a few points below the average of 81 for all families in general. Some critics say this does not make sense, and is a flaw in the SWS surveys. My response is that they are not merely wrong, but most unkind and cruel, to think that happiness is incompatible with poverty.
One should be thankful that most of the poor, and even most of the hungry, still find a basis fqr-happiness. This tendency is not peculiar to Filipinos.
According to the renowned psychologist Bob Cummins, what subjective indicators measure is happiness as a mood, rather than happiness as an emotion. A mood is something stable, whereas an emotion tends to be fleeting. Cummins explains the narrow variation of happiness in surveys, all over the world, by theorising that happiness, as a mood, is controlled by a management system that he calls subjective well-being homeostasis.
Just as their physiological systems normally keep body temperature within a narrow range, people's psychological systems normally work to keep happiness from extreme change. A homeostatic system is resilient, working to help people bounce back from unusually bad (or even unusual!)'good) experiences.
Unhappy people seek help from external resources, the major ones being money and relationships. Cummins says that emotionally intimate relationships are the most powerful defence. Unhappy people also use internal resources such as the ability to rationalise or "explain away" a bad situation, to their advantage. (Would feeling a close relationship to God be an internal or an external resource? Either way, this homeostatic element would be very Filipino.)
Bob Cummins, professor of psychology' at Deakin University and developer of the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, is the incoming president of the International Society for Quality- of Life Studies and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Happiness Studies.
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