The Truth About Happiness

According to the United Nations’ sponsored program on happiness, the world’s worst place to live your life is in a fictional country called dystopia [1]. The virtual opposite of “utopia,” dystopia is an imaginary land where happiness is all but absent in the lives of the distraught and unfortunate citizenry, where misery, poverty, starvation, and insecurity rule each day. In the UN’s report on happiness, no nation on the planet could ever be statistically or theoretically worse off than the hard-hearted world of dystopia. That is until the folks at the Happiness Index decided to take a closer look at the Central African Republic. So brutally unhappy is life in that central African nation that to preserve dystopia’s statistical position on the bottom of the happiness ladder – as the worst-of-everything country – the statisticians at the Happiness Index had to lower dystopia’s ranking from 2.33 on the ladder to 1.85. Without this tweaking of misery, the Central African Republic would have ranked worse off than the unhappiest place imaginable [2].