Would you be happier homeless in Fresno, California or homeless in Calcutta, India?

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Calcutta, hands down.

I’ve posted before that the downtrodden of Calcutta are far happier than you’d think, given their circumstances. It demonstrates how relatively unimportant money can be to individual well-being.

This takes it further, showing how even in a rich country, life can feel much worse when we lack the things that are really key to enjoying life.

Via Authentic Happiness:

Common sense would have us believe that Calcutta’s poor are overwhelmingly dissatisfied. Astonishingly this is not so. Their overall life satisfaction is slightly negative (1.93 on a scale of 1 to 3), lower than Calcutta University students (2.43). But in many domains of life their satisfaction is high: morality (2.56), family (2.50), friends (2.40) and food (2.55). Their lowest satisfaction in a specfic domain is income (2.12.)…

When Biswas-Diener compares the pavement dwellers of Calcutta to the the street people of Fresno, California, however, he finds striking differences in favor of India. Among the seventy-eight street people, average life satisfaction is extremely low (1.29), markedly lower than the Calcutta pavement dwellers (1.60). There are a few domains in which satisfaction is moderate, such as intelligence (2.27) and food (2.14), but most are distressingly unsatisfying: income (1.15), morality (1.96), friends (1.75), family (1.84), and housing (1.37).

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