We live in an age of information explosion. And since there has been rankings over the globe that compared one and another nations with various standards like GDP, etc. ，why we still regard happiness as a important element to measure whether livable or not?
The world enjoys technologies of unimaginable sophistication; yet has at least one billion people without enough to eat each day. The world economy is propelled to soaring new heights of productivity through ongoing technological and organizational advance; yet is relentlessly destroying the natural environment in the process. Countries achieve great progress in economic development as conventionally measured; yet along the way succumb to new crises of obesity, smoking, diabetes, depression, and other ills of modern life.
Here I’d like to borrow some words from Charles Dickens. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so. far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Yet, we can still see from it, the one and only standard to measure how people survived today is simple happiness.
We can see from these charts that nations from the top are with a comprehensive welfare state and collective bargaining at the national level with a high percentage of workers belonging to a labor union; and state provision of free education and free healthcare as well as generous, guaranteed pension payments for retirees funded by taxation. In a word, these nations are all highly Left deviation which they called “social democracy”. In a way of saying they overcharge the middle to upper class by taxing and use that to give the rest of people welfare.
Supported by some big economic group as IKEA H&M , etc. , they sure have power to achieve the best education all over the globe for free, life standard, and highly completion of gender equality. We can assume these can be the reason why they are happy.
And we can see the very two intimidate economical and political powerful nations, US and CHN, has not achieved an ideal position on this ranking. We may ask ourselves, why we aren’t happy?
In China we can see a mass contradiction between the urban and rural area. Country kids are profoundly conservative while city kids are authentic holding some very exclusive views on LGBT equality and gender equality. You can see giant city like Beijing Shanghai have already reached the standard of the classic international city like Paris and Tokyo in economy and politic importance, while the rural area are still blind. And as the government are making rules on the balance of that, people have different political view would probably feel the dark night of their soul.
As far as I can see, this generation all have a giant growing tumor of anxiety. Even from the basic education, we hold on the pressure to get good score, and it will only increase along the way we grow to adults and start to take our own responsibility for our family. The expensive cost of marriage, the growing scaring housing price, the expensive merely elite education, the expensive medicine cost ,etc. we need to work so hard to survive it. But I think the fundamental reason is that in China, we are almost not able of live with any pride if we can only handle basic physical labor. So to bear the ever increasing housing price and living costs, we have to fight through so called well paid occupations instead of jobs we really longing for . And still we need to overwork to earn our place in office, or get ready to face the threat of being quit. The education evolution in Tianjin already show us the curtly and overbid situation of education, so when this generation decide to propagate, the education would also be a burden for family.
Some may start to judge our generation’s view of celibate and DINK saying we are selfish. But as you can know, we are just what this age brings. Respect other’s choices and try to understand may make us happie
