This is the key defining factor for happiness says research

India ranked 126 out of 143 countries in the 2024 Annual World Happiness Report. The report is conducted by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Individuals' own assessments of their lives determine the ranking of happiness. They took into account factors such as GDP per capita, social support, and healthy life expectancy.
Over 10 years (from 2014 to 2024) India’s ranking has slipped from 111 to 126.The overall happiness index in India is now lower than in war-torn regions like Ukraine and Palestine. Even economically stressed countries like Uganda and Pakistan rank higher than India in happiness. India’s GDP has doubled over the last 10 years but our happiness has reduced, why is this happening?
Move from Collectivism to Individualism
Harvard University recently shared the findings of a study it had conducted over 80 years, the premise of the study (titled the Study of Adult Development) was to understand what makes people happy over time. The research shows that close relationships with friends and family are the biggest predictors of happiness. Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. India has undergone a major social transformation over the last few decades. The shifts from rural to urban settings and the acceleration of nuclear family setups have caused the traditional emotional support structures to fray. Many people (especially in urban India) are not in regular touch with family, have very few real friends, and have little social interaction outside their work setting. The creeping normalization of this has happened so gradually yet insidiously that the harmful compounding effects over time on overall societal happiness are only now beginning to get clear.
Isolationism caused by social media
The World Happiness Report also revealed that older people in India are happier than younger ones. This seems counterintuitive at first glance but becomes clear when we see the excessive reliance on technology to find connection, purpose, and enjoyment amongst the young. The deleterious impact on mental health of social media is well documented. Social media algorithms stimulate the dopaminergic pleasure pathways of our brains. Dopamine is a chemical produced in our brain that gives feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation. Social media algorithms stimulate the sensations of surprise, reward, and a sense of excitement all of which trigger dopamine. This is why time online can seem so rewarding, but this time online comes at a big opportunity cost. The cost is the time away from those activities that are indispensable to healthy emotional development — such as outdoor play, face-to-face conversation with friends, and sleep.
Win-at-all-costs mentality
The hunger for success and progress amongst the young has yielded great economic dividends for India. This restless energy however is not cost-free and comes with some negative externalities. The tragic suicides in Kota, the epidemic of anxiety amongst young students, and mass scale loss of well-being are all emblematic of a deeper malaise of a loss of compassion and connection.
Solutions
Many of the factors impeding the pathways to happiness are not unique to India, the effects on India however have been more pronounced because of the great difference between our traditional way of life and our current lifestyles. This also offers some clues for the solutions to the unhappiness scourge. All living beings need a state of balance and equilibrium among the body systems for the body to survive and function correctly. In biology, this state of balance is referred to as ‘Homeostasis’. Just as individuals have a state of homeostasis, even civilizations, and societies need a state of emotional homeostasis to flourish and function in good health.
Prioritizing healthy emotional connections
The steady-state normal of the Indian civilization over millennia has been the creed of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. This has given India the resilience and tensile strength to overcome wars, invasions, and other setbacks. The loss of deep connections between friends, and family and the alienation from the village roots has been especially tough on the younger generation in India. To replace these connections with other connections schools and the education system policymakers will need to engage in planning and implementation to teach children to value and prioritize healthy relations and connections.
Mindfulness
Homo Sapiens are the only species that spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: worrying about events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Research shows that mind-wandering is the human brain’s default mode network. Unfortunately, a wandering mind is also an unhappy mind. According to research conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert 47% of our waking hours are spent thinking about what is not going on. They used a special “track your happiness” iPhone app to gather research. The results: We spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings and most of this daydreaming doesn’t make us happy. The solution for this is in our traditional Indian methods of mindfulness and meditation. Schools should actively include this in the curriculum to give a bedrock of lifelong emotional health for the younger generation. As India marches on inexorably to become a political and economic superpower schools and policymakers must prepare the foundation to create a happy future and not only a successful one.