Happiness of People at Different Stages of Life
The 2024 issue of the World Happiness Report evaluates subjective well-being across different stages of life and global regions.
Global happiness has remained relatively stable. South Africa, as an emerging market with a notable divergence between high emotional resilience (driven by strong community support and ubuntu), shows an overall life satisfaction score that is heavily dragged down by structural challenges like poor health expectancy and governance corruption.
Key Insights on Age and Well-Being
- Generational Divide: Individuals born before 1965 report life evaluations roughly 0.25 points higher on the 10-point scale than those born after 1980.
- North American Drop: Youth happiness in North America has collapsed to the point where the young are now less happy than the old.
- European Convergence: Central and Eastern Europe saw massive gains across all age groups. Young people in both halves of Europe are now equally happy.
- Negative Emotions: Worry, sadness, and anger are more frequent globally than in previous decades, except in East Asia and Europe. These are reported at higher rates by women.
What the Report Says About Sub-Saharan Africa
This is one of the only regions of the world where men report higher overall life satisfaction relative to women in localized pockets, though negative emotions still rise heavily for both genders with age.
- Happiness Trajectory: Average life evaluations have remained relatively flat in mid-life groups, but have risen slightly for both the young and the old. Region-wide inequality in happiness scores has spiked heavily, growing more than 20% and affecting the elderly the most.
- Age Gradient: Life evaluations are consistently highest for the youngest demographics. Subjective satisfaction remains stable through the middle age groups before rising slightly for men and falling for women in the older bracket.
- Top Performers: Looking purely at Sub-Saharan nations, Mauritius leads with top-tier rankings, followed by South Africa and Congo (Brazzaville).
- Gender Disparities: Negative emotions carry a moderate gender gap, tracking significantly higher for women than men as they reach older age brackets. While young women initially experience high relative wellbeing, severe drops follow later in life.
- Digital Saturation: The region features extreme, compounding digital gender gaps rather than pure over-saturation. Men continue to dominate new mobile internet and smartphone uptake. Severe barriers in education and affordability leave a vast majority of poor, rural women on the wrong side of the continent’s digital divide
Source: worldhappiness.report,
The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board. The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of our partners, the University of Oxford, or any organisation, agency, or program of the United Nations.
Reference: Helliwell, J. F., Layard, R., Sachs, J. D., De Neve, J.-E., Aknin, L. B., & Wang, S. (Eds.). (2024). World Happiness Report 2024. University of Oxford: Wellbeing Research Centre.
