Mercatornet has an interesting piece on politically fashionable and commercially lucrative ways to promote happiness. This really is a tangled web we are weaving.
The government of New Zealand will start, with next year’s budget, to measure the nation’s wellbeing. Happiness experts, environmentalists and socialists have been promoting the idea for decades, but this may be the first formal attempt in the developed world to measure how happy citizens are alongside the wealth indicator of GDP.
The frequency with which the NZ media highlight mental illness and suicide among Kiwis suggests that it is high time for such a move. The same could be said of most Western countries.
Indeed it could and no doubt suicide rates are a somewhat gloomy way of measuring happiness. Not necessarily inaccurate though.
A new report by Unicef contains a shocking statistic - New Zealand has by far the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world.
A shock but no surprise - it's not the first time the country tops that table.
The Unicef report found New Zealand's youth suicide rate - teenagers between 15 and 19 - to be the highest of a long list of 41 OECD and EU countries.
The rate of 15.6 suicides per 100,000 people is twice as high as the US rate and almost five times that of Britain.
However, putting suicide rates to one side, the Mercatornet piece also links us to an article in Quartzy about a fast-growing cousin of the happiness game - the wellness business which isn't particularly fond of facts.
Facts are now considered debatable
As a culture, we’re currently in the midst of an intense period of questioning. Pretty much every age-old system out there is currently marked as “pending further review.” Like, for instance: government. Or religion. Or even science. We’re questioning whether these systems still represent a larger concept of truth —or even that there is a singular version of truth at all.
In some ways that is terrifying. But in other ways, it’s liberating.
We’ve been living at the mercy of outdated systems —puritanical, patriarchal, you name it—for way too long. So how do we decide what is actually true when the guiding systems we used to rely on are broken or irrelevant?
At some point in recent history, we decided to use “because it makes me feel good” as a key metric by which we determine truth. Truth has become, in essence, anything that makes us feel good about ourselves. That shift created the perfect conditions for the wellness industrial complex to flourish.
All too familiar - we have always had problems with "because it makes me feel good".
A woman caught with 78 wraps of cocaine and heroin up her vagina told police they were just for ‘personal use’.
Lauren Carson, 31, was stopped in the capital’s West End when officers saw three men and a woman following her looking to buy drugs.
The Glaswegian gave officers a false name and struggled when they grabbed hold of her after spotting clingfilm-wrapped packages in her mouth.
4 comments:
A very wide-ranging post this evening, so please excuse the disconnected thoughts.
1) I'm always a bit suspicious of suicide rates, because of the methodological problems in operationalising and measuring suicide. Ultimately, "suicide" is a label put on a death by a coroner or equivalent, and coroner's practices differ between countries. There are varying levels of technical expertise, and a varying readiness (due to religion, cultural shame, etc.) to categorise deaths as suicide.
2) I think the collapse of "truth" is the biggest single cultural change we are facing. Perhaps one strategy is to be as sceptical about our own feelings as we are about the old power-structures.
3) That's a lot of wraps of heroin! Strewth! I know that drug users are often also involved in prostitution, but I can't help feeling she has rather spoiled her chances in that area.
The government of New Zealand will start, with next year’s budget, to measure the nation’s wellbeing.
The mad socialist can't spend it on services to the public?
Jacinda Ardern's government is enough to drive anyone to suicide.After 9 years in opposition they came to power with no real policies and seem to be making it up as they go along.They are however very good at virtue signalling and this is probably more of the same.
Sam - I'm a little suspicious of suicide rates too, but the high figures for NZ youth suicide rates presumably indicate something seriously amiss. As for truth collapsing, I sometimes see it that way and sometimes wonder if it never was as important as we might suppose.
James - mad bureaucrats too - I don't think there is much practical difference between socialism and bureaucracy.
John - interesting. Not something I know much about but it sounds as if Jacinda and co are as you say - very good at virtue signalling. Seems to be a global disease in the developed world.
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