Skip to main content

Home/ CIS Focal Issue/ Group items tagged happiness

Rss Feed Group items tagged

ksenia12348

The Sex Recession Is Making Young Americans Unhappy - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In 2018, happiness among young adults in America fell to a record low. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 reporting that they were“very happy” in life fell to 25 percent—the lowest level that the General Social Survey, a key barometer of American social life, has ever recorded for that population.
  • Happiness fell most among young men—with only 22 percent of young men (and 28 percent of young women) reporting that they were “very happy” in 2018.
  • We wondered whether this trend was rooted in distinct shifts in young adults’ social ties—including what The Atlantic has called “the sex recession,” that is, a marked decline in sexual activity for this group in recent years.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • We’re happiest when our ties with others are deep and strong. And the research tells us that the ebb and flow of happiness in America is clearly linked to the quality and character of our social ties—including our friendships, community ties, and marriage. It’s also linked, specifically, to the frequency with which we have sex.
  • So we investigated four indicators of sociability among today’s young adults—marriage, friendship, religious attendance, and sex—in an effort to explain
  • married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married
  • As it turns out, the share of young adults who are married has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 28 percent in 2018. The decline has been similar for men and women, although from 2016 to 2018 the share of married men fell, while the share of married women rose.
  • Faith was the second factor. Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all
  • The share of young adults who attend religious services more than monthly has fallen from 38 percent in 1972 to 27 percent in 2018, even as the share who never attend has risen rapidly.
  • The third factor was friendship. The effect of seeing friends frequently is less clear than that of marriage or religion, but young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers.
  • Indeed, it may be that rising social time spent with friends in recent years could be buffering young adults from the declines in institutions such as marriage or religion, as friends stand in place of other relationships or forms of community.*
  • And, finally, we looked at sex. Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex.
  • This trend in rising sexlessness is broadly confirmed in other surveys of sexual behavior,
  • Less sex, we speculate, could help account for declining happiness for many young adults.
  • What’s more, as the #MeToo era has taught us, there has been too much unwanted or nonconsensual sex out there, which is obviously bad for the (more often female) target of such advances. From this perspective, the so-called sex recession might just amount to a sexual recalibration, with a lot of bad sex being eliminated from our social lives—and this would be a good thing. For all these reasons, the feminist family historian Stephanie Coontz is “suspicious of any hand-wringing” about the sex recession.
Olga Bykova

Supporters | Happy Planet Index - 0 views

  •  
    Everyone accepts that GDP alone cannot tell us anything of substance about how we are doing as a species. It tells us nothing of the state of our planet, or the wellbeing of its people. It is simply an indiscriminate measurement of economic activity. The Happy Planet Index is a step towards developing alternatives.
Irina Marchenko

G20's Young Entrepreneurs are Increasingly Interested in Digital Technologies but not H... - 0 views

  •  
    The recommendations summarized in a final Summit communique primarily focus on the following: *Need to develop digital infrastructure. Young entrepreneurs are the most active group in terms of both starting up businesses and using the latest digital technology to help run the business and optimize business processes; *Importance of developing educational programs for entrepreneurs, advancing the entrepreneurial culture, and streamlining government funding for "green" technology studies; *Need to ease the tax burden in the fields of scientific-technical programs and social entrepreneurship, namely the taxes imposed on employers and employee income tax; *Access to funding for startups and emerging companies. Ensuring funding on easy terms, changing banking requirements, developing rules for new forms of funding, including cross border online platforms, investors' and entrepreneurs' networks.
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20 items per page