(MrCharly photo.)

Deseret News reports, "Research says gratitude brings health, happiness."  Perhaps that explains why so many Americans, citizens of the richest and most powerful nation in the world, are nevertheless unhappy.  The U.S. ranks #13 in happiness at 84%.  Iceland (#1 at 94%), Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands (tied for #2 at 91%) top the list— and even the Philippines beats us (#12 at 85%).  On the Happy Planet index, we rank a dismal 114th— Costa Rica tops that list.

This despite our powerful (and expensive) military, which keeps us safe from enemies real and imagined.  And we imagine more and more of them.

Our wealth permits us to buy things much of the world can't imagine, like televisions that cost more than what half the households in the world earn in a year, and automobiles that cost 30 times the world median income.  And those aren't even luxury automobiles, just your basic Toyotas.

We have banished death— if not completely, then at least to the realm of hospitals and mortuaries where we need not see it.  And we have banished aging, out of sight if not out of mind, thanks to surgical techniques, implants, injections, and hair color.

None of this has brought us happiness.

Which brings us back to the subject of gratitude.  Says Wiki,

"[G]ratitude is experienced if people perceive the help they receive as (a) valuable to them, (b) costly to their benefactor, and (c) given by the benefactor with benevolent intentions (rather than ulterior motives)... People who generally experience more gratitude in life habitually interpret help as more costly, more beneficial, and more beneficially intended; and this habitual bias explains why some people feel more gratitude than others."

This contrasts starkly with the typical American view of things: people help us because we deserve it; we are the most powerful and therefore the most deserving, and we could succeed without help if we wanted to.  With aging and death banished from our collective consciousness, we see such events as catastrophic and undeserved rather than inevitable— we have no sense of consequence for what happens if we don't receive help.

Is it possible that our inherited national wealth has made us unhappy?  Contrast the sense of entitlement of today's generation in this country with, for example, the work ethic of an impoverished Mexican immigrant hoping to improve the lot of his family.  No wonder we don't want them here— they work hard, and are grateful for the opportunity.  That makes us look bad!

If gratitude is the source of happiness, then only adversity can make us happier.  Perhaps, subconsciously, that is why we're systematically destabilizing our economic system.  We are, so to speak, killing the goose that lays the eggs.  Some call this the inevitable failure of capitalism.  But perhaps it is our ongoing search for happiness, and our sense of betrayal that wealth did not provide what we sought.