Gallup’s new report on emotions reminds us: Life is what happens when you’re offline

Last year was the hottest year on record in Earth’s history, with 2024 on track to match or exceed it. The war between Israel and Hamas is in its 9th month, and the civil war in Sudan is in its 15th. We’ve had mass layoffs in multiple industries while enduring the contentious spectacle of choosing the next American president. And our airplanes are falling apart in the sky while the people on board are falling apart too. What a time to be alive!

According to Gallup’s 2024 Global Emotions Report, however, people actually are feeling pretty good about their lives these days. The number of folks around the world who report having had positive experiences recently has apparently returned to pre-pandemic levels. But taking even a cursory look at the news at any given moment would appear to contradict the report’s findings. How could people report feeling so positive when so many aspects of life on this planet are so observably terrible? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the report is based on experiences, and not observations.

Tracking emotions

Gallup has been compiling its annual global emotions report—not to be confused with its World Happiness Report—for the past 18 years. The report provides a quick look at how people around the globe seem to be doing, based on polls about their recent positive and negative experiences. As the report’s authors lay out in an introduction, “Gallup’s Positive and Negative Experience Indexes measure life’s intangibles—feelings and emotions—that traditional economic indicators such as GDP were never intended to capture.”

The report is a massive undertaking, with Gallup’s researchers interviewing nearly 146,000 adults over the age of 15, across 142 countries in 2023. Each interview involves a series of yes-or-no questions about positive and negative elements of their previous day. (“Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?” “Did you experience worry during a lot of the day yesterday?”) The researchers then weigh the answers for both positive and negative experiences, to tally the index scores.

Not only did the Positive Experiences Index inch up to 71 this year, its highest point since the pandemic began, the Negative Experiences Index decreased for the first time since 2014. Since young people as a demographic were unchanged in their higher-than-average reports of positivity, most of that improvement appears to have come from people who are 30 and older—you know, the sort of people most likely to have jobs, kids, and mortgages, and to be generally stressed out.

Touching grass

Reading these sunny findings before plunging into the stormy sea of misery and anxiety known as the internet is enough to give anyone cognitive dissonance. How can people feel so good when so many things are clearly so bad? As trite as it sounds, the answer may be as simple as logging off.

While many of the responses used to measure positive experiences remained static from the previous year, the two with an uptick for 2024 were answers to the questions: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” and “Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?” These questions have more to do with how a person moves through the world than how information about the world moves through them.

If the way one spends their day is split between doomscrolling and then arguing online, the chances of being treated with respect diminish drastically. But for people who mainly interact in person with their coworkers, friends, and romantic partner—except for popping into Jersey Mike’s for lunch or trading a nod with a fellow dog owner during an evening constitutional—the chances are likely much higher. And as for the second question, a person can learn a lot of interesting new things online, but doing something really new generally involves going outside.

As the peak-pandemic era recedes further into the rearview, more people appear to be getting comfortable with being out in the world again, having new experiences, and putting themselves in a position to be treated with respect—and to treat others the same way. The fact that a high percentage of the 146,000 poll respondents happened to be those kinds of people should be easy to swallow. Or at least as easy as picturing those same people also getting appropriately livid at some point in the day during an occasional glimpse of their phone.

The loneliness factor

However, if you think this report seems a little too rosy, you’re correct. The bad news is that the Negative Experience Index remains higher than it was a decade ago. Also, Gallup added “loneliness” to the list of negative emotions that its researchers asked about this year—and it turns out, nearly one in four adults worldwide (23%) reported feeling lonely during a lot of the previous day. That’s way too many!

Obviously, some people have a largely negative experience of the world, even without spending an excessive amount of time online. Anyone who is desperately lonely, whose health is failing, who has lost a loved one recently, or who doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from—these are not issues that “logging off more” can solve. The report is a timely reminder, though, that it’s possible to appreciate the positive things in our own lives, and that it might help to spend a little less time looking out of our digital windows onto the world.

It’s not about ignoring what’s out there, but appreciating what’s in front of you.

The world may often seem like a terrible place, but the fact that we can meet up with each other to talk about it at a coffee shop, and possibly have a pleasant exchange with a neighbor on the way, makes it that much more bearable. Maybe even a little positive.