Happiness

Global analytic firm Gallup conducted research and found out that the Philippines is the most stressed and the second angriest and saddest country in Southeast Asia in 2021.

The Gallup Global Emotions Report measures “the world’s emotional temperature” through extensive surveys and studies that discover the “emotional states of people in more than 100 countries and areas.”

Gallup uses probability-based samples among the adult population, ages 15 and older. The respondents were asked if they felt stressed, angry or sad the day before the survey was conducted.

Almost half or some 48 percent of Filipinos said they felt stressed prior to the survey, the highest among Southeast Asian countries.

Laotians are the most angry at 29 percent, followed by the Philippines with 27 percent.

Cambodia is the saddest country in the region with 42 percent saying they experienced sadness, followed by the Philippines with 35 percent.

Yet, the Philippines was found to be the second happiest country in Southeast Asia, according to the 2022 World Happiness Report. Singapore topped Southeast Asian countries at 27th spot with a score of 6.480.

We were ranked 60th out of 146 countries, a small improvement from 61st spot last year. The Philippines garnered a score of 5.904 this year. The report was published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Finland remains as the happiest country in the world for the fifth year with a score of 7.821. Afghanistan is at the bottom of rankings with a score of 2.404.

Rather than asking people if they are happy or sad, the UN study apparently computed happiness indicators  such as gross domestic product per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, personal freedom, and perceptions of corruption.

On the other hand, SWS in December last year, found 65 percent of adult Filipinos expect the coming Christmas to be happy (masaya), eight percent  expect it to be sad (malungkot), and 22 percent expect it to be neither happy nor sad. The 65 percent that expect a happy Christmas is 15 points above the record low of 50 percent in 2020.

The expectation of a happy Christmas was a record-high 82 percent when first surveyed by SWS in 2002. It declined to 77 percent in 2003 and to a range of 62 to 69 percent  from 2004 to 2013 before it improved to 71 percent in 2014, and 79 percent in 2019. It dropped to a record-low 50 percent in 2020 before rising to 65 percent in 2021.

I have always thought that we Pinoys are a happy people. Nothing could faze us. We cope with challenges and we are always full of hope that times will be better and our dreams will come true.

But it does seem now that we have become less happy through the years. The burdens of life seem to be getting too heavy for many of us to bear. And the world has also become more crisis prone, with developments from wars to economic downturns making us more worried about our future.

Too much social media exposure is also getting us very stressed, angrier, and sadder. Too much toxicity in the air.

The situation being what it is, I thought it was a golden, but missed opportunity for Junior’s first SONA to inspire us to look beyond what we see today. It would have been just the right time to urge our people, in the words of John F Kennedy, to ask what you can do for your country.

Sayang. Junior could have expanded on his Unity campaign theme. I think he discarded it after the election. The SONA, according to Rep. Joey Salceda, cemented his role as technocrat-in-chief.

Come on, Joey… calling him a technocrat was as good as you can think of to praise him?

Unfortunately, that’s what’s wrong with the SONA. It had a lot of numbers crunched and diced by technocrats with little or no emotive appeal to Mang Tomas at NepaQ. And often, the technocrats perched on their ivory towers, are the last persons a president must trust for getting the right feel of the public pulse.

Having been in this racket of ghostwriting speeches for decades, I can see why the SONA didn’t have a soul. Technocrats submitted bits and pieces of their programs to someone in Malacanang who then strung them together like longaniza and voila, we have a SONA. The Americans call that resulting sausage, baloney.

As I said last Wednesday, the SONA touched on important points. Key problems like food security and education were covered. But much of the same things said in the past were said. After more than an hour, we still have no idea why Junior will be different.

There was nothing drastic, nothing earthshaking in the approaches Junior revealed. Condoning agrarian reform loans may seem drastic, but those are uncollectible anyway.

Junior did not think drastically enough about the structural defects of the agrarian reform program itself that is at the root of enduring poverty and lack of productivity at the farms.

So, after we condone the debts, what happens? How will farm productivity increase? Modernize agriculture? We tried that. Why will it be different this time? Build farm to market roads? That had been a long time racket known as farm to pocket roads. Provide financial and technical aid to farmers? Good thing to do, but again, how will it work effectively this time? Roll out Kadiwa Centers? Sounds like a knee-jerk response that will fail again.

Apparently Rep. Joey batted for land consolidation:  removal of legal barriers to joint farming and leasing of agrarian reform lands. Maybe those will follow.

Excuse me for being cynical, but I, indeed we, have seen this movie before and we don’t like the ending. How can Junior make it end happily ever after this time?

Junior lost a grand opportunity to harp on the Unity theme. The laundry list of the technocrats shouldn’t have been more than a few paragraphs. I would have expanded on why the crisis we now face cannot be solved by the government alone.

Next week, let’s talk about unity and how a government partnership with the conglomerates may make things different. We have to all be happy again.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.