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They’re trying to measure overall mental wellbeing with the GHQ-12. Do you not think that less stressed people are happier?

• marginalia_nu 5y ago
  > The BHPS contains a standard mental wellbeing measure, a General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) score. This is used internationally by medical researchers and others as an indicator of psychological strain or stress Regardless of what they are attempting to measure, the tool they are using is used to measure stress. Chronic stress can absolutely make you less happy, but it's not the single source of unhappiness, and the complete absence of stress isn't equivalent to happiness either. People need challenge in their lives. Not overbearing challenge, but not too little either. - Look at it this way: Even some of our poorest can turn night into day with a light switch, can produce potable water from a tap, can see and talk to people across the entire planet, we can travel faster than the fastest horse, can read almost any book from any time without even having to master latin and greek. Our kids don't have a 75% chance of dying, our noses aren't falling off from syphilis, nobody is going mad from ergotism, we have access to seasonal foods all year long. So if it is true that having wealth makes us happy, why isn't everyone living in perpetual bliss, given we have wealth that exceeds the wildest imagination of past times' kings and emperors? Why aren't we happier than we are? Or was Alexander the Great suffering and miserable from not having a new model iphone?