Happiness of traditional peoples ties with rich countries – 02/24/2024 – Reinaldo José Lopes

Well, money doesn’t really buy happiness: order online and have it delivered to your home. Let anyone who has never used a cynical tirade like this cast the first stone when the relationship between good financial condition and personal satisfaction comes to the fore. Jokes aside, however, it seems that the true conclusion to be drawn about this eternal dilemma is “it depends”: in some social contexts, people can consider themselves quite happy without a penny in their wallet.

That’s the main takeaway from a tremendously simple yet intriguing study published recently in PNAS, the journal of the US National Academy of Sciences. Led by Victoria Reyes-García, from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​the work started from an apparently banal piece of data: research on the (self-declared) level of happiness of people in different countries, which every now and then gains newspaper headlines like this Sheet and are soon forgotten.

At first glance, this type of research seems to confirm the cynical attitude that it is best to order happiness on a shopping website. In fact, people who live in countries with a higher average per capita income tend to report being more satisfied with their lives than those living in poor countries.

There even seem to be numerical thresholds in this. For example, only in countries with an annual per capita income above US$40,000 does the average life satisfaction “score” exceed 7 (on a scale of 0 to 10). And where that income is below $4,500, there is no average score above 5.5.

So far, no surprises, unfortunately. But Reyes-García and his colleagues’ idea was to do the same research in traditional communities around the world. In other words, they asked the standardized question – “Considering all aspects of your life, how satisfied do you consider yourself to be on a scale of 0 to 10?” – for Tuareg nomads from Algeria, Brazilian riverside dwellers on the Juruá River and fishermen from the Fiji Islands in Oceania, among others. In total, there were 19 communities of this type, whose members have non-existent or almost non-existent “monetary” income (based on official money).

Result? Although there is a large variation in responses (which is expected, given the large differences in almost all other factors from one place to another), the “average level of happiness” of traditional populations is 6.8. Which means that it surpasses that of rich countries such as Italy, Japan and Spain, in addition to being tied with that of Belgium and the United Kingdom (Brazil’s is 6.1). And four of the places have very high levels of life satisfaction, above 8 – even above the Scandinavian countries, considered the happiness champions of the 21st century.

Of course, many factors can explain this result. Another important detail that has emerged in research on satisfaction with one’s own life is the comparative element. In other words, people tend to see their position on the “happiness podium” in comparison with those around them.

So, in a relatively small and egalitarian social circle, even if with few resources in absolute terms, the tendency is to look around and think “yeah, I’m not so bad”. In industrialized societies, on the other hand, a higher material standard would be necessary to compensate for the obvious presence of people much richer than you.

But it is quite possible that this is not the only explanation. More detailed interviews with traditional groups tend to reveal that satisfaction is closely linked to factors such as the intensity of social relationships with those close to them, the feeling of harmony brought by these ties and also contact with nature.

There is, in short, much more than one way for a human being to feel content with life. Although it is not feasible to simply copy the experience of traditional communities in global metropolises, learning from them may well be vital for our future.

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