Happiness

Thanks to Rhiafor reminding me that I am not really a real Westerner. This is not sarcasm - this is a fact that I sometimes forget and it does me good to be reminded of it from time to time (though not too often).

She writes about the low (and, apparently, falling) levels of happiness in the first-world countries. No shit. When people's life doesn't suck in any urgent and immediate way and they have lots of free time they have an opportunity to think and realize that life sucks in general. When people have to struggle not to be eaten by the enemy soldiers, or even not to be sent to a kolkhoz for the upcoming weekend, they get some sense of accomplishment and victory (except for the ones who actually got eaten by the enemy soldiers, who are unlikely to be answering a happiness level poll because they are busy being digested), and they have no time to think that ultimately they will lose. Western people, on the other hand, have a lot of time on their hands and a lot of opportunity to think that they will lose in the end anyway, that they will die and rot, that before that they will probably become old and weak, that if their medical tests came out clear today there will be a point when they won't come out clear, unless of course they get run over by a bus first, that we'll all die, and most of us will get old, that every life story is basically a tragedy, that people never get what they want, never get to keep whatever they have, are never really safe and secure, that everyone they love will die too, unless they already have, etc.

All of the above nonwithstanding, I really don't miss the times when instead of all of the above I had to think about how to temporarily get rid of a "labor and recreation camp"'s political counselor yelling at me for not weeding rows of turnips fast enough under pouring cold rain despite the fact that I couldn't really tell turnips from weeds and neither, I suspect, could the political counselor.

Whatever the happiness levels reasearch shows, people are very consistently trying to move from the happy third world to the unhappy first one.

BTW, why do they call third-world countries "developing countries"? Are they developing in any positive way?