What, me worry?

Happy belated New Year! Now that I’m back from a long hiatus, I can finally address something I’ve been meaning to write about for over a month: this.

In short, back in December, the New York Times reported on a happiness study that ranked the the state of New York dead last in the union in terms of the happiness and fulfillment of its citizens. The research was conducted by two economics professors who measured Americans’ self-assessed levels of satisfaction with their lives alongside objective factors like air quality, commute time, cost of living, taxes, etc. The two correlated remarkably, providing, according to the press release about the study, “the first external validation of people’s self-reported levels of happiness.”

Now I suppose in some ways it might seem like a given that New York ranks so low, considering nearly 8.4 million people in our state live in New York City, which undoubtedly has poor air quality, frustrating commuting times, a ridiculously high cost of living, and so many other pain-in-the-butt factors. But last? Seriously? Mississippi, which, when ranked by median household income and by per capita income comes in as the poorest state in the country, is number 6 on the happiness scale! And Texas, land of guns and Dubya, which boasts two of the poorest cities in the U.S. and four of the poorest counties, ranks at number 16. What’s going on here?

For an obvious starter, wealth clearly does not determine happiness. And of course New York state has its healthy share of poverty (Buffalo is the fifth poorest city on that list, and Bronx the third county). But I have to say it’s still pretty shocking to think that New York is theoretically the worst state to reside in in the nation, based both on objective and subjective qualifiers. My knee-jerk reaction was to justify the findings by rationalizing that maybe we’re just more self-aware than everyone else. (One friend posted the NYT link on Facebook with the musing, “Maybe we’re just better kvetchers.”) But admittedly that’s a classically stuck-up New York City argument to make. Plus, if objective factors are mirroring self-assessment here, trying to write off the results by crying inferior or superior powers of self-awareness seems like it would prove difficult.

For me, the next theorem—odd as it may sound—is that maybe there’s more to life than happiness. It’s a strange idea to contemplate: I’ve spent most of my 25 years seeking happiness, and I’ve always used the pursuit of it as a guide for making major life decisions. But how else to explain why 19.5 million people live here, making it the third-most-populous state in the country at the same time that it’s also the unhappiest? Or maybe it’s not that there’s more to life than unhappiness, but rather that things are just more complicated than such a simple dichotomy: happy vs. unhappy, rich vs. poor, black vs. white. Sometimes it’s hard to break a cycle; one could lead an unhappy life but, when weighing that condition versus an upheaval and removal to another place, decide that unhappiness is the preferable choice. Others might argue that being unhappy is part of finding your way toward happiness, and at least if you’re self-aware about it, you’re in a decent place to start rectifying things. Or perhaps, as Clyde Haberman suggests in the Times, contentment is overrated. Perhaps New Yorkers thrive on chaos and restlessness; that certainly seems like a requisite for living in New York City.

Whatever the reasons for explaining our failure of the happiness test, it’s interesting to consider what keeps us here despite the congestion and the mess that passes for our government sometimes and the questionable quality of life. I know why I stay in New York—because it feels like home in an inexplicably magnetic way, plus a million other reasons. Why do you?