“Every year, European adults lose 11.4 million good years of life to loneliness. This makes loneliness more detrimental to human happiness than any other condition under consideration.”
This study come from the Happiness Research Institute:
“What’s worse: not being able to pay the bills? Living with a debilitating chronic condition like Parkinson’s disease? Or feeling isolated and alone?
Our new report – Long and Happy Lives: The Future of Wellbeing in an Aging Society – seeks to answer these questions. In this report, we focus on the link between subjective wellbeing and 26 adverse life conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, unemployment, physical inactivity, divorce, cancer, loneliness, and more. Our analysis is largely based on survey data from more than 115,000 respondents over the age of 50 in Europe. We estimate wellbeing burdens associated with each condition in terms of “Wellbeing Adjusted Life Years (WALYs)” lost.
“The use of subjective wellbeing metrics can help to uncover impacts and burdens that have been traditionally been underestimated or remain completely invisible to us.” – Kirsten Jensen, Principal Advisor The Treasury of New Zealand (Te Tai Ōhanga)
WALYs enable us to rank the severity of each condition in terms of their negative influence on human wellbeing. This ranking can be estimated on two levels: 1) by considering how much wellbeing individuals lose to the life condition in question, and 2) by considering how much wellbeing is lost to a given condition among all individuals in a given society …”
You can find out more from here.
