Gross National Happiness USA Happiness Report

States are typically evaluated on a small number of widely used metrics: their economies, their education and healthcare systems, and the opportunities they provide to residents. These factors help assess a state's livability, yet each only partially answers a larger question: where are Americans leading their best lives?

In order to explore well-being in the United States, Gross National Happiness USA (GNHUSA) conducted a survey asking 5,000 Americans about their life satisfaction, happiness, anxiety, and the extent to which they believe they are leading worthwhile lives.¹The sample was evenly split across each of the 50 states, with each state collecting 100 responses stratified by age and gender. Because we sampled evenly across states, our universe overrepresents lower-populated states, like Wyoming and Alaska. This is the first nationwide survey in the United States to pose this set of questions, which has been regularly polled among citizens of Great Britain since 2011.

Thank you to our contributors who supported this research.

Delaware boasts highest life satisfaction,
Oregon reports lowest average

With residents from every state participating in the survey, we are able to locate the peaks and valleys of happiness across the US - as inconspicuous as they may be.

Respondents from Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, and South Dakota reported the highest life satisfaction.

Delaware, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida are the only states to exceed an average life satisfaction score of 7.0 on a 10-point scale. South Dakota falls just short, with an average score of 6.9.

Respondents from Oregon, Oklahoma, Washington, Rhode Island, and West Virginia reported the lowest life satisfaction.

Oregon and Oklahoma are the only two states to score below 6.0 on a 10-point scale.

Overall, the range of life satisfaction across the 50 states is fairly narrow. No single state can fairly claim to be the capital of US happiness, nor is any state noticeably lagging behind the country in this metric.

In fact, all but 6 US states have an average life satisfaction between 6.0 and 6.9. The gap in scores between even the highest and lowest scoring states is minor in comparison to the gulf observed between high- and low-scoring countries in the World Happiness Report.

What's the 21st letter of the alphabet got to do with happiness? Not much at the moment.

The 'u-shaped curve' is perhaps the most enduring concept in the study of wellbeing. Its name derives from the shape commonly observed when charting happiness by age: the average person enters adulthood with relatively high happiness and gradually becomes less happy with each passing year before bottoming out in their 40s, at which point happiness gradually rebounds to reach a second peak in old age.

As such, the relationship between age and life satisfaction is normally found to form a u-curve:

This is a widespread and replicable finding: one 2020 study observed the u-shaped curve in datasets from 145 countries. Yet, that's not to say the theory is an indisputable truth: our survey data show youngest respondents are reporting some of the lowest life satisfaction scores on average.

Younger adults in the US are experiencing lower happiness levels than those later in life, producing a linear trend rather than the expected parabola. Individuals aged 18-24 years have an average life satisfaction score of 6.1, which is the lowest of any age bracket. Each subsequently older bracket gets slightly happier than the preceding, maxing out at a score of 7.3 for the 65 and older age group.

While this finding contradicts plenty of well-being literature, we are not the first to find lower levels of happiness among young adults. This is perhaps yet another consequence of COVID-19, especially given that younger Americans have been significantly more likely to report feelings of loneliness throughout the pandemic.

Above all else, Americans
credit family with their happiness

USA Happiness Domains: <45 and 45+

Percent of responses mentioning topic

Our survey's sole open-ended question simply asked "What makes you happy?" Although answers to this question were sweeping in nature, certain themes cropped up again and again.

For example, family was mentioned in 45 percent of responses, making it by far the most common factor to which respondents attributed their happiness.²This includes any submission which used at least one of the following keywords: family, husband, wife, daughter, son, granddaughter, grandson, grandchildren, 'my children.'

Other common topics such as health, finances, and religion were touched on in 6.3, 6.2, and 4.5 percent of responses, respectively.³A submission was counted as answering "health" if it used any of the following keywords: health, healthy, exercise, exercising, working out, gym, being active, hiking, biking;

counted as answering "finances" if it used: money, financially, finances, debt, bills, or economy;

and counted as "religion" if it used: god, lord, church, prayer, bible, jesus, faith, christian, temple, or religion.

Individuals aged 45 years and older were more likely than younger respondents to link their happiness to family, health, and religion. For example, 48% of the older age group mentioned family, compared to 41% of the younger age group.

Other happiness domains presented age gaps as well, but to lesser degrees. Finance was the sole topic we measured that younger respondents were more likely to have come to mind when asked about their happiness. Notably, those who thought to discuss financials in their submission also reported lower levels of happiness and higher levels of anxiety than those who did not mention finances.

Thank you to our contributors

Happiness Pioneers

Prodege

Susan Schuster

Happiness Champions

Anonymous

Rob Moore

Happiness Innovators

Oliver Gladfelter

Paula Francis

Sabastian Hunt

Happiness Activists

Other

Get involved with GNHUSA

Gross National Happiness USA is a 501c non-profit organization focused on changing the definition of progress and success in the United States.

This survey was only made possible by contributions from readers like you. We plan to collect more responses in the future and to eventually show the trend of USA happiness over time, so please consider making a donation to support this important research.

You can also support GNHUSA by subscribing to our newsletter.

Rob Moore ✉

President, Gross National Happiness USA

US Happiness Report

Delaware boasts highest life satisfaction,Oregon reports lowest average