>The UK has earned second place for being the most miserable country in the world, a "worrying" new mental wellbeing report has found out.
>The UK landed 70th out of 71 for overall mental wellbeing, earning an average score of 49, classifying the UK as enduring - comparatively low compared to the average global score of 65. The report found that UK mental wellbeing levels in 2023 had not recovered from pre-pandemic levels, according to researchers at the US-based Sapien Labs think tank. 35 per cent of respondents in the UK said they were struggling with their wellbeing.
>Overall, the highest proportion of people who said they were not coping lived in Britain, Brazil and South Africa. Whilst wellbeing for those over 65 has remained steady, 18-24-year olds across eight English-speaking countries' mental health has shown the least improvement since 2020. Also struggling are young adults and poorer families who have endured two economic recessions in just four years, the cost of living crisis and rising rent and house prices.
>Another issue making Brits miserable is the lack of trust for political leaders, such as chaos in Westminster, changing prime ministers and partygate. Across all age groups, the study found that eating extra-processed goods results in much worse mental wellbeing. 60 to 70 per cent of food eaten in the UK is extra processed, with over half of Brits eating it daily reported feeling distressed, compared to 18 per cent who rarely or never do.
>The number of people who said they were distressed or struggling increased from pre-pandemic years to 2023, and has shown little change for all 71 countries. Conducting the study, scientists said: "Overall, the insights in this report paint a worrying picture of our post-pandemic prospects and we urgently need to better understand the drivers of our collective mental wellbeing such that we can align our ambitions and goals with the genuine prosperity of human beings."
>Taking first place for the most miserable is Uzbekistan - a country situated in central Asia. The UK government advises against travelling to Uzbekistan's border with Afghanistan, unless essential. 17 per cent or so who live there are under the poverty line, according to the Asian Development Bank. Over half a million people across 71 countries responded, with experts finding that low scores for richer countries were down to early-age smartphone use, eating highly processed food and loneliness. The study also focused on mood and outlook, motivation and drive, social self, adaptability and resilience, mind-body connection, and cognition.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/uk-second-most-miserable-country-in-the-world/
How can we fix how miserable this country is before we all top ourselves?
I can't imagine that anywhere else is doing amazing right now, so we're probably just much further ahead on the road. Like deindustrialisation but for wellbeing.
On Christmas Day I took my mum's dogs for a walk and three of the four people I wished "Merry Christmas" to looked startled. Maybe it's my 'tache, but for whatever reason people in this country are just extremely anti-social and I think that's a big factor in our miserableness. Blaming it on Westminster seems like a stretch, because the governments of countries like Nigeria and Sri Lanka are considerably worse, or at least they're starting from a lower baseline. I think it would be more accurate to say the country feeling like it's declining is the bigger problem, but you might say that I'm splitting hairs. In fact I'd say that, and I just did.
What to do about it? Anihilate every Tory MP and prospective Tory MP immediately I'm unsure, state funded evening classes of your choice? That sounds nice, let's do that. People can learn new skills, at least some of them will go to the pub afterwards and some of them will end up shagging and that will help out with the birthrates as well. Fucking Hell, that's a brilliant idea, I should have Robert Jenrick's head on a spike job.
Too brilliant for Britain, we'd end up with 'sensible' rules attached on what you can learn followed by the inevitable collapse as we simply run out of teachers and classrooms for courses in computer programming and (not-so-woke) tolerance. And you'd have all the animals in the class with you like in the school days.
>How can we fix how miserable this country is before we all top ourselves?
Looking at wellbeing data from the ONS, I think the only thing that stands out is the state of public services and the cost of living. Most people are satisfied with their social relationships, loneliness hasn't particularly increased since the pandemic, people in work are generally quite satisfied with their jobs, (perhaps surprisingly) most people are satisfied with their accommodation, but people just aren't confident that they'll be looked after by the state when they need it.
In all sorts of ways, the failure of the state is making Britain feel increasingly insecure and dog-eat-dog; things we used to take for granted are becoming scarce commodities to be fought over. Here's an example you might not have heard. My nephew needs a driving license for work. He's done loads of lessons, but he can't get a test booked - there was a huge backlog after covid, which was added to by civil service strikes. Apparently booking a driving test is now like getting tickets for Glastonbury, because touts are bulk-booking test appointments as soon as they're available and selling them for hundreds of pounds.
I think the next government needs to set out a clear but realistic strategy for recovery - an economic "we shall fight on the beaches". They need to admit in stark terms that the fabric of British society is fucked - that the roads are full of potholes, that people are struggling to get an appointment with a dentist or a GP, that benefits don't pay enough to live on, that practically everyone feels quite a lot worse off than they did a few years ago. They need to be honest that we can't fix things overnight, that higher earners are going to have to bear more of the burden, that progress towards repairing society will be slow and difficult, but also steady and determined. People need to believe that there's light at the end of the tunnel.
If the next government can't start to rebuild trust in the state, then I really am fearful for the future. Very dark things can happen if people believe that the only way to get what you need is to take it from someone else.
>>98407 In fairness, the driving test thing is happening because someone thought it would be a good idea to replace the system where the candidate books their test, and their details checked against issued licences, with one where an "instructor" can book tests without giving the candidate's details, and where they can switch around appointments after the fact. It would not have been possible had they stuck with the perfectly sensible system they used to have.
>>98407 >but he can't get a test booked
Not with that shitty attitude. If you're willing to travel up to 100 miles for your test, you can get one within a couple of days at face value. You can even increase your chances of passing by picking an easy test location.
I get what you're saying, but don't you think it sounds a bit third world? We're creating a two-tier system - a totally broken system for people who just accept what they're told and take what they're given, and a system that sort of works for sharp-elbowed people who know how to wangle things. That's the sort of inequality that breeds deep resentment.
>>98410 Oh, right, obviously people must be imagining the part where they're unable to book a test because they've all been block-booked by people who very obviously don't have driving licence details for that many people.
>>98412 When no test results are returned by the web app, it doesn't state why or who is occupying the diary. So yes, absolutely, people coming to that conclusion are imagining it. I don't know why you'd assume organised crime can't rustle up hundreds if not thousands of provisional licenses either.
>Across all age groups, the study found that eating extra-processed goods results in much worse mental wellbeing. 60 to 70 per cent of food eaten in the UK is extra processed, with over half of Brits eating it daily reported feeling distressed, compared to 18 per cent who rarely or never do.
They've got this totally backwards, it's not processed foods making people miserable. It's that miserable people don't have the energy or willpower to cook proper fresh food.
Also processed foods are a cheap way to fill yourself up. I know if I say that then someone is going to reply "well actually, you can cook healthy meals very cheaply", but I can guarantee that whoever says that has never shopped at Iceland or Farmfoods.
What people often miss when it comes to the fresh food cheaply argument is that in order for it to really work out, you need to be either cooking large portions for the whole family, or else batching and freezing it (which again, comes back to a time and energy issue- If you work overtime to make ends meet and only get one day off in a week do you want to spend half of it making bolognese?), or going shopping much more frequently, because fresh stuff just doesn't last in the same way as a frozen pizza or bag of pasta and a few jars of sauce. For most people, trying to do everything fresh will just lead to a lot more food waste, which translates into wasted money. Fresh food just doesn't scale very well, and this is a big reason the stereotypical single bachelor or student etc will live on pot noodles and frozen pizzas. It's not that they can't make fresh food, it's just that it's a lot of extra hassle.
I think otherlad has it right though, really all of this, all of it, comes down to money. This country is, on average, becoming really quite poor. The vast majority of people earn somewhere between 20 and 30 grand, and it's only a relatively small group earning above that. The median is slightly higher, but in terms of the kind of wages the largest chunk of people in the country earn, it's lower. We used to have a lot of things that balanced out comparatively low wages, but all of that has either been systematically stripped away, or it has been left to deteriorate to such a state that it may as well not be there.
People see their bills going up while their wages stay stagnant and it's obvious they are going to become stressed and worry about it. Even if they are doing alright now, they know it only takes a few more rent hikes or council tax increases or what have you before they are slipping under too. It's like clinging to the edge of a raft which is heading slowly towards a waterfall. You can paddle hard enough to slow yourself down, but you know you can't stop yourself going over eventually. That's the kind of thing that you just can't shake off your mind and put to rest.
>>98415 >>98416 I think the connection between poor health outcomes and ultra-processed foods is thoroughly proven at this point. I don't think you can argue with this. Yes, people with poor wellbeing will struggle to eat right but it's clear that processed food will only make that problem worse and deliver an enormous amount of carbs that won't satiate you over an evening. What happens is you get hit with a brief high and then feel worse which not only deprives your motivation further but long-term ends with diabetes.
I'd link this to the fact that despite cooking being easier than ever most people have little experiance with cooking or eating right. We don't have the mentality for sitting down and enjoying a proper meal these days, especially at lunch, and now I'd hazard young people would be uncertain how to eat a pear. The same is true of getting some simple fresh air exercise.
And Iceland is expensive. Utterly shameless even on the premium they place on fruits and veg if you have the audacity to want to eat something other than low-quality frozen cheese. This is practically a conspiracy at this point that the poor now only have access to low-quality and expensive fresh ingredients that for their and their children's health they are expected to make do with over the bullshit in the frozen food aisle.
>>98417 Potatoes, carrots, chicken breast and some variant of greens costs absolutely fuck all and is easy to prepare. You can even do it all in one steamer pot and don't have to batch-cook at all. There are people all over the world cooking all sorts of variations of a simple meal everyday and have done for centuries.
You can though, because pretty much all of the research is bollocks and the term "ultra procressed" is a buzzword without even a solid definition.
People who eat processed foods are unlikely to have a balanced diet in general, and it's as simple as that. It's not anything intrinsic to those particular foods, it's just that people who turn to those options are more likely to have a shit diet overall.
It's really not that hard, but the country is miserable as fuck for good reason and if you look to places in this country that have good qualities of life and abroad, the common factors are all there yet we choose to ignore them . Look around you, outside of pockets of unique circumstance or extreme wealth, the country is incredibly grim. It's grey, it's rainy, it's kind of damp, and every UK town and city is the same carbon copy that we know lead to worse health outcomes and worse quality of life outcomes, yet we accept it because 'it could be worse'.
What is modern life for the average Brit? What stimulates their senses, makes up their surroundings, their every day interactions with the world and provides them enrichment? Well...retail park, suburbs with no meaningful facilities, cars needed to drive everywhere, decaying high streets with vape shops and charity shops, more depressing days out that cost a fortune and again require lots of driving everywhere. Drive everywhere, don't see people, don't foster community, work in ever increasingly poorly paid work and hope you can turn your heating on. Don't aspire, don't care for local conditions, just PCP car, take on debt, scroll instagram, watch the chase, eat ready meals, eat more ready meals, watch Good Morning Britain. And on, and on, and on and on. Nobody has hope, nobody thinks it is getting better. We don't aspire to build nice surroundings, we just build generic carbon copy tat, so nobody ever really has anything to feel proud of. Lots of people don't exercise, they just stuff their face with unhealthy food and sugar.
Look at the places home and abroad where people have good qualities of life and aren't miserable and the common factors are obvious as to what makes a nice place and what makes people happy. They're broadly the following:
- They live in places where people feel connected to the local community. They have groups they can be a part of, they know their neighbours, they interact with them, they volunteer their time in pursuit of something for the local area and that sense of local community couldn't just be transported elsewhere.
- A huge one nobody talks about meaningfully - car dependency. What makes York so nice? The centre of parts of London so nice? Quaint European towns so nice? It's walkability. If you spend your whole interaction with the outside world stepping outside your door, climbing in a metal box and then stepping out at another place then you don't feel part of it, you don't feel connected, and there's no third space, or chance encounters. Compare this to living in a small town or village where you can walke verywhere. You go to local shops, you know the owners, you spend locally which keeps the money in your community and stops shops leaving and going bankrupt, you might bump into neighbours, you get low intensity exercise, you care about the walk between your house and another part of the village. This doesn't happen in a car, you just whack on the radio or Spotify or a podcast and drive from one bit to the other. It might look grim out your window, but who cares? You're in your protected metal box.
-Low intensity exercise. We are utterly Americanised on this and its partly down to the car dependency. Live in London and it's incredible how many steps you'll get in a day just walking about, catching the bus, catching the tube, walking through interesting and nice parts of a great city. You get thousands of extra steps, all day, every day. Compare that to living in a suburb somewhere with nowhere to walk to and driving because your local bus service is one every two hours, and ending up at a generic business park. Maybe stop off at a Starbucks on the way. I'm not critiquing, life is hard, challenging and time is scarce, but I notice in the UK (including my own parents) that hitting about 50 means that you just give up, you're almost expected to become dormant and fat and stop caring for yourself, inevitably causing health problems and leading to a rapid decline in health and lots fo ailments. Compare this to the Netflix 'Blue Zones' documentary, 70 odd year olds are doing calisthenics in the park to keep fit. They probably aren't popping the same daily array of pills for old age. Pic related.
-Cooking healthy, home cooked meals. I eat like shit, this has been covered loads, my mental well being feels almost invincible when I exercise and eat properly. When I eat lazy and shit food, I feel shit. The UK eats a lot of shit food.
-Towns and cities. The country is massively averse to things that aren't chains. Independent cafes, shops, restaurants are plentiful, but they are dwarfed by chains. People prefer the predictable Nandos peri chips than trying somewhere new and it not quite being right, meaning they never discover something great. I'm not saying you can't have a Nandos, but this then means taht the only places that stay open are national mega corps who set up in a depressing retail park. Compare that to your local restaurant in a nice village.
- Cars again, fuck me how grim is it when everywhere is just dominated by people that can't iamgine doing anything without driving their loud, smelly, grim car there. I live rurally, I chose to live near a train station, I cope just fine without a car and just rent one on the odd occasion I need one. When I drove to work everyday I was utterly miserable, I commute by train now and walk everywhere else and it can suck, but I never feel the same utter frustration than leaving work at 5 and still being sat in traffic at 6.30 because there's been a crash and somebody beeped me and cut me up.
- Cost of living and budgeting. I stress about everything, so after I bought a house the first thing I did was save enoguh money so that if I got fired I could live for a year without having to hand back the keys. The cost of living has gone mental, and people are fucked and without that security. I feel stressed knowing how stable my situation is, I cannot imagine for a second how stressful it is for people who are one or two paydays away from homelessness or severe hardship. Our culture in some places is built around PCP cars and the latest phones. We just don't need it.
- Third spaces - we need loads more.
I could go on but the average Brit life has been decimated by car culture dependency, lack of low intensity exercise and domination of generic, soulless business park/retail park lifestyles. It's not how we're meant to live. This Government has let everything decay, and the more it does, the less hope people feel, so the worse it gets. I could go on for ages.
I am unhappy for a few reasons, most of which have already been discussed, but I don't really agree on the rankings of each reason.
Economy: the problem as I see it, is that the link between hard work and success has been almost completely severed. If you try really hard at your job, will there be someone who works half as hard as you for twice the money? Almost certainly. The advice is always the same - start at the bottom, and work hard, and you will succeed. So go ahead and follow that advice. Flip 500 burgers an hour in Burger King and see if they make you CEO. They won't; that's not how this works. You started at the bottom and all you got was a job that was incompatible with promotion into better jobs. You worked hard and in the best-case scenario, you're the best minimum-wage burger-flipper on the trading estate. That won't make you the richest person there; you might not even be the richest person in Burger King. At the very least, I think we as a society need to be given better advice on how to become successful, because the advice people get now is all bollocks and most jobs are dead-end jobs that will never, ever turn into great careers. But there's still plenty of wealth and success out there; you just need to know how to get it. And hard work is often not the way. Like a previous post said, the answer is more to do with sharp elbows and generally being a bit of a psychopath.
Loneliness: this is a bigger problem than health, for me. I drink far more than I used to, because now I have a friend whom I actually like. I met her in a pub, and we go to the pub a lot. At last, I enjoy going to the pub. But the majority of people in the pub, myself included, are absolute losers. I have never used a dating app, and I don't really want to. I am also catastrophically lonely. Perhaps these are linked, and perhaps the real cause of loneliness nowadays is social media, and everything being online now. That's a very valid argument which I support wholeheartedly, but right now I'm moaning about pubs. It's incredibly rare to meet people worth meeting in a pub; it's far more frequently mentally unstable alcoholics with no hobbies and nowhere else to be. My one good friend's boyfriend is in hospital right now, and she is sick to death of all his friends asking her how he's doing, instead of asking him. But those friends are like me: they are simps who are desperate to speak to her instead of the usual barflies that make up everyone they know. They don't want to check on the sick old man; they would rather use the sick old man as an opportunity to finally speak to a sexy lady. It hurts me to observe how similar they all are to me. I'd be so much happier if I could go with my friend to pursue fun and edifying productive hobbies instead of just drinking around a picnic table in the smoking area for the third time that week. But I have invited my friend to some potential hobbies, and she doesn't want to go. She's a barfly too. So am I. We are all losers. It's horrible.
Processed food: my diet is probably the worst of anyone here. A year or two ago, I thought I should try and change things, and I couldn't figure out how. I decided I would buy fewer biscuits, and eat other things the way I eat biscuits. I really smashed through a lot of jars of olives, and peanuts, and maybe pistachio nuts if I had a real hard-on for health. But none of those foods are healthy either. I look in the supermarket for things I can eat huge amounts of between meals which are healthy, and I don't think there is the provision for such a lifestyle. I eat a fair few limes and grapefruits, but almost never more than one a day. Most standard fruits are things I don't like, so fuck you; I won't eat them. That's like three fruits ruled out; there's no way that's the entire diet of all healthy people everywhere. What am I left with? Radishes? Pomegranates? Do normal people just chew on raw broccoli as they type this post? Healthy food is shockingly unattainable once you actually start looking for it.
I still think that if I could fix the loneliness, I would be sharing my life with someone who could help with every other problem, and those other problems would all fall like dominoes if everyone in society was closer. That's the key to all of this.
Atomisation is an intended feature of neoliberal consumer based capitalism. All of this is working as intended. Make everyone miserable lonely, then sell them the cure- Look at the premium subscriptions on all of the dating apps, online games, onlyfans, twitch... This was the endpoint the early ad men had wank fantasies about.
As with everything, the fundamental root core problem here is the economy, but it goes so much deeper than merely everybody being a bit poor at the minute. The social alienation and consequent poor diets and lack of exercise, break down of community bonds and lack of compelling surroundings, all of it is linked in deliberately with the economic system we live under. It's not a symptom of a system failing, this is all working as intended.
The Century of the Self was made over 20 years ago and it remains as accurate as ever. Watching it 10-15 years ago, I found it interesting and thought provoking. Watching it again today, it was nothing short of profound. In the post-digital age, where the internet has been fully normalised as an everyday feature of life and not just a fancy toy for geeks and nerds, we can see all of those society reshaping processes come to fruition.
There really is no cure for this malaise other than a complete reform of our economy; you don't have to believe in a socialist utopia or anything like that, but you do have to recognise that this economy based wholly on consumption and marketing, is killing the human soul.
Food is really one place you can improve. I get my five (or more) a day from a smoothie for breakfast. Just get a selection of frozen fruit and veg and some juice, stick them in the blender. Normally I use a fresh banana, 60g frozen spinach, a handful of frozen blueberries and same of pineapple chunks with a small glass of orange juice and a couple of shots of lemon. Plus whatever seed I can find with the cheapest fibre in, so it's more filling and digests better. Easy to customise, you can change it up to fit whatever you think you're missing or flavours you like, just blend and drink. It's not the same as a balanced and varied diet like you're supposed to eat with things spaced out through the day but it's infinitely better than not. If you're at all autismal it's a great habit to cultivate.
>I think the connection between poor health outcomes and ultra-processed foods is thoroughly proven at this point.
The correlation is very clear, but there's practically no evidence demonstrating a causal link. We know that the sort of people who eat the sort of food that poor people eat are in bad health, but nobody has disentangled the extent to which eating loads of chips is a cause or a symptom. For all we know at the moment, we might as well argue that wearing clothes from Sports Direct is terrible for your health.
Being obese is obviously really bad for your health, but beyond that I think that the link between diet and health is probably badly over-stated for political reasons. It's convenient to believe that poor people die well before their time because they're just too greedy and lazy to eat proper home-cooked meals, rather than because they're chronically stressed and have little reason to be hopeful and get neglected by the NHS.
Orwell said it best: One can only be truly happy once they realise happiness is not the point of life. This was from Down and Out in Paris, which I recommend you read. It was from a time when the majority of Parisians (and Londonians) lived in terrible poverty, similar to what a lot of people in Sri Lanka and El Salvador are living in now. And they were truly happy in a way, because they knew they had no point in trying to achieve their ambitions, unlike people who were a wee bit richer like you or me who thought they might have a chance. By giving up on those ambitions and focussing on getting food out of pure necessity, the only thing they could do, which was a simple goal, life became simpler and far less frustrating.
Basically, of COURSE those people are going to feel happier, and of course the study's going to reflect this, because they're COPING BETTER as they're used to the situation, whereas westerners can't bloody cope because they life a better quality of life and the downturn is more noticeable. I'd rather bloody live here than Venezuela.
Happiness and sadness are not always logical or based on seeing things as they truly are. Surveys like this are flawed. Don't tell me the mental wellbeing of an Australian is THAT FAR below that of the United States. There's far more to it than happiness, and that's contextual to begin with.>>98403
>>98428 Forgot to say - I've lived in Australia and Britain, and I know which country I'd rather live in for the sake of me health and security. Britain is a better place to live, even if Australia is NICER. And Australia's not too bad to begin with.
>>98430 Have you lived there? I have, and it's a lovely place, but you have to define 'better' with these metrics. Not the same as nicer (and it is certainly NICER) don't get me wrong. But I've been in the deep end of the healthcare system over there and I'd rather deal with the NHS, yes, really. And I'm white. If you're Aboriginal, well...
