Plummet

How to be happy—it’s one of the most fundamental human quests. So why does it feel so hard and, well, unhappy sometimes? It may be because we’re looking for happiness in all the wrong places. With all the things modern society offers in the name of happiness—from closets full of clothes to the internet to endless entertainment, we should be happier than ever, right? And yet Americans’ self-reported state of happiness declined all throughout the last half of the 20th century and then plummeted after 2010, according to the World Happiness Report.
—The Reader’s Digest