Stereotypes: How Happiness Has Changed

Happiness is very different for everyone. Over the past year’s people’s views and how they think has changed and that’s due to all the new technology that has been presented in our society. By studying the different kinds of information you can infer that happiness has changed in many ways and people have very different opinions.

Table 1 from the “Got Joy?” page indicates that people have changed over the years. In 2004 there were more optimistic people than in 2013; in fact, looking at the info-graph about people considering if they’re optimist or pessimist you can see that in 2004 79% of people said they were optimist, but in 2013 only 50% of people said they were optimist. In addition, there were only 2% of people in the middle section in 2004 whereas in 2013 43% of people were in between the two. The number of people not knowing what they considered themselves has increased from 1% to 3% since 2004. The numbers got worse over the years and you might ask why. The answer is in the following bar graph about what people do to improve their moods. This graph shows how dramatically the numbers have dropped, but then the pie chart shows us that 56% of people spend their time on social media. This means that more people are paying attention to social media than their own life’s.

When people were asked “which makes you happier?” 59% of people said achieving a goal, 35% said “working toward a goal”. This means that people like to have things done and not have to put in more work. When people were asked if they were as happy as they expected to be at this stage of life 41% of people answered “as happy as expected”, 28% said “happier than expected”, and 27% said “not as happy”. This means that people just strive for something and just stayed at that point, they didn’t get any happier just stayed the way they expected it to