Here’s a paradox worth revisiting as I sit here paralyzed with a mean case of writer’s block/procrastination fly trap: more people commit suicide in locales that self-identify as “happy.” Like Utah, which is full of happy jerks being athletic and having great diets and a fulfilling spiritual life. If you’ve never spent much time in the Salt Lake City suburbs, it’s a bit like an Applebee’s commercial crossed with an REI store. It’s also beautiful and fairly clean-feeling.But, then again, there’s also a giant dead lake right there that’s inhabited mainly by sea monkeys and flies. A lot of people kill themselves in Utah too: the state has the ninth highest suicide rate in the country, according to a 2011 study in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; meanwhile, it’s ranked number one in “life satisfaction.”State by state, the pattern maintains. New York is miserable, ranking 45th in life-satisfaction — yet it has the lowest suicide rate in the nation. Even when you adjust for differences in age, gender, race, education, income, marital status, and employment status you wind up with the same positive correlation. In the author’s words, “the paradoxical positive relationship between state life‐satisfaction and state suicides that is seen in raw, unadjusted data appears to be genuine; it is not due to confounding caused by differences in population characteristics across states.” Interestingly, the correlation seems to hold across Western nations.A possible explanation, also from the paper:Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life. Those dark contrasts may in turn increase the risk of suicide (our results are reminiscent of the interesting finding by Platt et al 1992 that suicide rates by the unemployed seem to be higher in low‐unemployment regions). If humans are subject to mood swings, the lows of life may thus be most tolerable in an environment in which other humans are unhappy. Whether such relative comparisons work by producing discord due to unmet aspirations, or reflect a real inability to integrate into broader society and gain access to key supports, remains to be understood.In other words, great fucking job happy people. If you choose to remain happy after reading a blog post about suicide, please, just keep that business to yourself. Thanks. But I’m also not sure I buy it, the whole life satisfaction thing, to begin with. My own professional opinion as editor-at-large here is that the results are skewed by a bunch of fake happy people secretly rotting on the inside. Didn’t you all see that one movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman masturbating into the phone book?It’s interesting to think of this in terms of Facebook, a realm that’s happy-leaning by design (like buttons, memory-sharing tools, etc.). It would seem that a dislike button is in the better interests of the public health, no?Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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