Before understanding why happiness is important, let us know what exactly is happiness.
Happiness is an emotion concerning how we feel, but it isn’t just a passing mood. We are emotional beings and experience a wide range of feelings daily. Negative emotions such as fear and anger help us to get away from danger or protect ourselves. And positive emotions such as happiness and hope allow us to connect with others and develop our capacity to cope when things go wrong.
Trying to live a happy life is not about discarding negative emotions or pretending to feel happy all the time. Happiness is about making the best times while coping effectively with the inevitable bad times to experience the best possible life overall.
Coming to the main question again: Why is happiness important?
Happiness has a wide range of benefits, starting from our performance, health, relationships, and more. We say success is the key to happiness, but actually, it’s the other way around; happiness is the key to success. The harsh reality is that in recent years we have focused more on being rich than being happy. In our country, we have reached a point where mental health is a more significant challenge and leading to more suffering than unemployment, poverty, or any other issue.
On March 20, we celebrate World Happiness Day, designated by the UN General Assembly in 2012. This year, on March 20, 2021, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the United Nations released the World Happiness Report.
The World Happiness Report ranks the 156 countries of the world by how happy their citizens believe they are.
The rankings are usually based on polling which looks at six variables:
For the first time, this year cities were ranked around the world by their subjective well-being and looked into how the social, urban, and natural environments combine to affect happiness.
-INDIA’S RANK AND ANALYSIS
India is a new entrant to the bottom-fifteen group ranking at 144 out of all the 156 countries. In the 2019 happiness index, India ranked 140, slipping 4 positions compared to last year. The report is based on the data collected in the year 2018 and 2019.
Although in the making of the report, the impact of the coronavirus outbreak has not been taken into account. Also, experts predict that the places under lockdown thanks to the Pandemic could fare well within the happiness index.
-Coming to India’s Happiness Index.
In the first-ever India Happiness Report 2020, the following states emerged in India’s top 10 happiest states. Mizoram, Punjab, Andaman and Nicobar, Puducherry, Gujarat, Arunachal Pradesh, Lakshadweep, Telangana, and lastly, Uttar Pradesh.
The survey was conducted supported six components of happiness, namely
It covered 16,950 people across all 36 states and Union Territories of India during March-July.
-IMPORTANCE OF COUNTRY’S HAPPINESS INDEX
The happiness index is increasingly considered an essential and helpful way to guide public policy and measure its effectiveness. When a country’s social fabric is robust, feelings of well-being can grow because people work together to unravel problems and appreciate the social support they need. If social institutions fail to satisfy the challenges of a crisis, individuals can become even unhappier because they lose social trust.
To shape policy with data about happiness and well-being, the report suggests that an analysis be done ranking all potential policies consistent with the quantity of happiness they could produce per rupee spent.
-CITIZEN’S CONTRIBUTION
Citizens must follow approaches on how people can pursue happiness within conditions of insecurity and uncertainty. The more we focus on our list of desired things, the more we fail to see what really matters. When things inevitably go wrong in our lives, we blame others or ourselves instead of learning from what happened.
As a nation, we must focus on creating a society promoting what actually matters and the capacities for discovering what matters. Creating a happy society does not just depend on creating the right conditions. It also depends on creating the right institutions and processes for discovering those conditions.