Attempting to measure happiness

The World Happiness Report has just concluded that young Maltese people under 30 are the “unhappiest in Europe”. When this conclusion was followed up and a group of youngsters were asked about it, one of the reasons they gave (and which was given prominence) is that the high cost of living coupled with unachievable property prices means they will be forced to live with their parents until they are 30. 

Now I can think of a lot of reasons for people to be unhappy, but this would not have been on the top of my list. Malta’s size can be suffocating, everyone knows your business, the corruption is endemic, laws are there to be openly flouted, the natural environment is practically ruined, green open spaces are scarce and rows of monotonously bland apartments are replacing once charming townscapes. In short, unless you can ignore all the anarchy or find positive things which compensate and tip the scale, this place can very easily destroy your spirit. 

So, this reason given by young people, who were interviewed at random, sounded very strange to me because it is still traditionally considered to be the norm for young adults to live at home throughout their university years and well into their late 20s. This is not because they are more enamoured of their family than their European counterparts, but because - let’s face it - living at home with no bills to pay and a university stipend coming in every month is not too shabby. 

The students at MCAST and the University of Malta who gave the “forced to live at home” reason for their unhappiness cannot have been more than 25 so, realistically, even when property prices were much lower, the majority of them would still have been living at home anyway. 

I also found the answers to be rather facetious: “I’ve just paid €5 for a cup of coffee”, a 20-year-old said. I hate to break it to her, but all over the world, not only are you at your poorest when you are a student, but you also do not dream of spending so much for coffee at what I can only presume is a coffee shop with a fancy brand name. Even more significantly, not only do you not go around splurging on expensive coffee but you are working your butt off to pay for your tuition and accommodation while knowing that you will start your working life with a deficit because you have to pay off your student loans. So, if one of the biggest gripes is the price of coffee - well, I think some perspective is sorely needed. 

To be blunt, undergraduate students in Malta have no idea how good they have it here (financially speaking) precisely because they have the luxury of living with their parents, and proof of that is the fact that no one wants to be a waiter or waitress any more. Waiting tables used to be considered a commonplace summer job for students who wanted to make some extra money (just ask anyone over the age of 40). But try and tell today’s students to work in catering and the look of scathing disbelief will knock you over. I can see their point really: Why would they want to do a job where they are serving others when at home many are still being served hand and foot? 

There is also another issue which some always overlook; owning your own home in your 20s, fresh out of Uni, is unheard of almost around the world and friends who share a flat at that age is so much the norm that entire sitcoms have been built around the premise. In contrast, home ownership is very much encouraged in our culture and saving money toward eventually buying a property is practically a sine qua non, which is precisely why the majority have always continued to live at home until they got married. 

Now, I am not denying the fact that Malta has become extortionately expensive - it has. But I think the age when one really starts to feel the bite of the high cost of living is actually over the age of 30, when one is in the middle of raising a family. Generally speaking, the average Maltese couple would have had the big wedding, have taken out a loan to buy their own home and started having children all within a span of five years. It is a crushing weight of responsibility when life seems one big whirl of endless bills to pay, sleepless nights and there never seems to be enough money no matter how hard they both work. 

And yet it is significant that it is not this age group which reported the most unhappiness. 

While the local report about the World Happiness Report naturally focused on how Malta fared, it is interesting to note that the general findings point to an increase in unhappiness across the board among Gen Z (aged 15-24) who live in the West, especially in the US and the UK. For the first time, younger generations are unhappier than the older generations. On the other hand, young people in most of central and eastern Europe, as well as parts of sub-Saharan Africa, reported increases in happiness, the report showed. 

Of course, happiness or general wellbeing can be a very abstract concept, so if you ask someone if they are happy with their life, their answers may vary and will probably not be that easy to measure. According to the World Happiness Report, “both social support and loneliness affect happiness, with social support usually having the larger effect. Social interactions add to happiness, with their effects flowing through increases in social support and reductions in loneliness.” 

For those who live alone or who work from home, social connections within our neighbourhood to places we visit daily, such as our favourite coffee shop, can be meaningful because of the small talk which might seem inane but which is often the one time we can speak to others face to face. 

Speaking to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy pointed out that economic prosperity alone is not the key to happiness. “What we are seeing is that in the more westernised developed countries we are pulling further away from one another because of technology. We have fewer friends that we trust, fewer relationships to rely on, and that has a direct impact on our wellbeing. There is also the impact of social media on the mental health of our youth… if they use it for more than three hours a day they double their risk for anxiety and depression.” 

Mr Murthy also said it is unfair to put the blame of excessive social media use on their parents because they are navigating a world which they themselves did not grow up in.  They are often not aware of how much harm and negative effects their children are being exposed to. 

One thing he said which really struck me was that on a university tour he realised that the cafeterias were the quietest places on campus - why? Because unlike in the past when students would be eager to talk after being cooped up in lecture rooms, now everyone is in their own silent world, with their ear buds on, hooked to their devices. They are even unsure of how to start up a conversation with someone new, for fear of being intrusive. 

Perhaps it is this isolation and constant online comparisons with others which have led to such a doom and gloom mind set among youngsters. Rather than feeling hopeful and excited about the future, as they should be at that age, they feel they have already failed before they have begun. 

One American student summed it all up by saying that social media was the biggest cause of dissatisfaction in her life and the lives of her friends. Along with deleting TikTok from her phone, she said she's embraced other pursuits in an effort to stave off a compulsion to doom scroll. “I’m trying to wean off social media. It’s so easy to get caught up in it, and all it does is make me unproductive and upset.”