According to new data from analytics firm Gallup, an invisible epidemic is upon us, and the toll may be far greater than we’re equipped to handle. Unhappiness has been rising to boiling point around the world for the past decade, it says, and too many world leaders have missed the warning signs.

In his new book, Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It, Gallup CEO Jon Clifton paints a chilling portrait of an increasingly sad society, the indifferent leaders who let it happen and the risks of not taking immediate action.

“About 15 years ago, we saw an opportunity to officially start quantifying how people’s lives are going around the world,” he tells The CEO Magazine.

“Many leaders were saying, ‘We need to move beyond gross domestic product (GDP)’; societal progress was being measured on the size of the economy, how much money people were making, but we didn’t capture how people were feeling.”

The idea of measuring goodwill and positivity was met with ridicule in many circles. “They said, ‘Are you really just going to capture people’s feelings? Does that really matter?’” Clifton recalls. “We said, ‘We think it’s what’s right.’”

Several years into the undertaking, the data Gallup collected warned of a society plagued by pain, stress, worry and sadness. “We went to warn the world about it,” he stresses. “We said, ‘This looks like a problem.’”

The findings were met with silence and indifference. “If it had been the global GDP contracting, it would have been headline news everywhere,” he says.

“It came at a bad time because this was 2020, so the world’s response was ‘Well, Gallup, why is this a surprise? We’re collectively suffering from a pandemic.’”

Rise in Negativity

However, the dire situation Gallup’s data revealed wasn’t caused by the pandemic, according to Clifton.

“Our data was from 2019. It had been coming for a long time, and the pandemic only exacerbated the concerning rise in negative emotions. The world didn’t listen, so we felt like the message would come across stronger in a book.”

Blind Spot, which hit the shelves in September 2022, carries some frightening portents.

“Psychologist Danny Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton have looked at our data and tried to answer the question, ‘Does money buy happiness?’ We may not be able to answer perfectly, but we’re a lot closer than we were 100 years ago, and that’s to say money doesn’t buy happiness but it’s hard to be happy without it,” Clifton says.

“Around 1.9 billion people are really struggling on their incomes today; they literally cannot get their basic needs met.”

For workplaces, the risk is very clear. “If you look at the people quitting during the Great Resignation in the United States, they’re statistically the most likely to be actively disengaged from their jobs. So when you have people who are emotionally detached from a workplace, the immediate risk is they’ll leave.”

The dream of the work–life balance is just that, he adds. “The idea that humans can compartmentalize what they’re doing is false. Humans struggle to do that. Just because your boss can’t email you after 5pm doesn’t mean the misery of work doesn’t follow you home.”

Combating Crisis

For society as a whole, Clifton believes the implications of Gallup’s data are worse still. “From a more macro-level perspective, as negative emotions were rising from 2011–19, civil unrest increased 244 percent,” he reveals.

“In 2014, 20 percent of people were moderately or severely food insecure. Today, it’s 30 percent. A lot of people have blamed the war in Ukraine for creating a global food crisis, but that’s not true.”

Negative emotions have continued to rise because the pandemic did indeed make everyone’s lives collectively worse, Clifton explains.

“It was especially hard on women juggling children and full-time jobs. It’s an obvious statement, but sometimes it’s good when data confirms what we already knew.”

It’s not all gloom and doom, however. “While it’s very possible the causes of the rise of unhappiness are what the data suggests, it’s hard to say for sure, and some have offered alternative ideas that are harder to test,” he points out.

“But if it is, in fact, the drivers we believe it is, then I think it’s very fixable.”

The Next Steps

Workplace misery need not exist, he insists, because a number of organizations around the world have achieved a thriving workplace. “And we find in our database that 20 percent of adults all over the world are thriving at work.”

Global hunger, another major driver of negative emotions, may be a bit more difficult to fix, but Clifton believes it’s doable.

“The causes are things like global conflict and declining economic conditions, but the world’s been here before, and for 40 years we were winning the war on hunger. We’ve figured these things out in the past.”

However, until the world’s leaders start to focus on how people feel, he says the downward spiral will continue. “Unless they start listening and begin working on solutions of the human emotional sort, I don’t think the world will correct this situation quickly,” he reflects.

The release of Blind Spot has hopefully started the process. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Wow,’” Clifton confirms. “Everybody says they feel something. They know there’s more pain and anxiety in the world, but they can’t put their finger on it.

“So when people read Blind Spot, they find it almost reassuring there’s data confirming that the way they’re feeling is true.”

The book is also the beginning of what he hopes will be a participatory process. “We can’t say definitively that we have all the solutions,” he says.

“A lot of people are offering their own thoughts about why they think there’s been a global rise in negative emotions and what the world might be able to do in order to fix it. I think that’s really powerful.”