Happiness of Americans vs. Europeans

I came across a very interesting article that focuses on factors affecting Americans state of happiness over the last 30 years and compares these factors to Europeans. The website for this article is http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1550309820070615. The article suggest what we were talking about in class, that Americans are becoming less happy over time. The article points to factors such as increased competition, longer work hours, less important or close relationships. There were two things I found interesting about this article. One thing was that the research done for it was done by Italians. The other this was that they put a huge emphasis on relationships having to do with happiness and equated them to money. They said that a person with no close relationships to family, friends or neighbors would have to make $320,000 more a year to be as happy as someone who does have close relationships. I find this very hard to believe. I don't think there is any amount of money that could make me happy if I had no close relationships. In my opinion close relationships play a major role in life. What reason would there be to work hard and make all that extra money if there was no one around to care or be happy for you.

Another thing about this article that stood out to me was the fact the authors compared American happiness to European happiness. They found that Europeans have been steadily happy for the last 30 years while American happiness has been on a decline. They cite longer hours, more pressure, and less security for the decline in happiness. I think this is interesting because it goes to show that happiness doesn't have everything to do with your job or what you are doing , it also has to do with what is going on around you. This also got me thinking about the fact that so much of our lives are based on working. When most of us think about our futures we focus on our careers. I'm wondering what about the rest of the time. We are not going to be working 24 hours a day. Surely there are other things to look forward to in the future other than work. I think that since the pressure and stress is probably not going to go away it is important to realize that we should focus on other things in our life to so we can be balanced.