And earlier this year new research pushed back on the argument that once a country becomes rich enough, further economic growth doesn’t boost wellbeing. After adjusting for the way people change their frame of reference over time, focusing instead on whether they say they are doing better than in the past, the research found life satisfaction continued to climb alongside GDP per capita even in countries as rich as the US.
We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted. We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective and current life evaluations, and apply it to unexploited archival data from the USA. When correcting for rescaling, we find that the well-being of Americans has substantially increased, on par with GDP, health, education, and liberal democracy, from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Using several datasets, we shed light on other happiness puzzles, including the apparent stability of life evaluations during COVID-19, why Ukrainians report similar levels of life satisfaction today as before the war, and the absence of parental happiness.
In 2023 almost 25% of American adults ate every meal alone on a given day, up from 17% in 2003; among under-30s the share has nearly doubled. That pattern probably holds across much of the rich world, says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, one of the editors of the World Happiness Report, an annual UN-backed study.
The consequences are measurable. Around one in six people worldwide is lonely, reckons the World Health Organisation. In 22 European countries the share of people who said they were “never lonely” fell from 59% in 2018 to 51% in 2022. The latest World Happiness Report found that across countries and ages, how often people share meals predicts life satisfaction almost as strongly as relative income or employment status.
In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in motivated memory as a psychological determinant of economic outcomes. According to motivated memory, people tend to better recall pleasant information because it serves their psychological needs. Another phenomenon, however, predicts the same pattern: According to mood congruence, pleasant information is easier to recall for individuals in nonnegative mood, regardless of any psychological needs. Since most people tend to have some need for self-esteem and to experience more positive than negative feelings during the day, the two phenomena predict similar outcomes in most ordinary situations, but not all. To test the predictive power of these two phenomena, we collect data from a laboratory experiment and from a nationally representative survey. We study how individuals in a temporarily induced negative mood (via a video clip) or those who report a low baseline mood (relative to the population) recall negative feedback. Our results meet the predictions of motivated memory: Individuals better recall positive than negative feedback, even when they are in negative mood. Motivated memory is not just a matter of mood.
They found that in 2023, 25% of 18-to 24-year-olds ate all three meals alone the previous day.
“That’s a virtual doubling of what it was two decades ago,” De Neve says, and it’s to the detriment of their mental health. The number of meals shared with others is “as predictive of their life satisfaction, essentially their overall well-being” as their employment status or relative income, he adds.
Many people believe that earning more money would bring more happiness into their lives (Aknin et al, 2009). However, despite massive improvements in material living conditions in most Western countries, average population happiness has stagnated for decades (Layard et al, 2010). This raises an evident question: does money bring about happiness?
The answer is ‘yes’, but far less than most people would think, and with strings attached. Herein, we review the state of the literature after half a century of empirical research on income and happiness. We will use the term “happiness” to refer to the evaluative component of subjective wellbeing, in particular measured as self-reported life satisfaction, and explicitly state whenever we are referring to the affective component.
In Senegal, out of 14 lunches and dinners per week, people share 11.7 meals, according to the 2025 World Happiness Report. In Sweden, people share 9.5 meals per week, in the U.S. people share 7.9 meals per week and in Japan, people share 3.7 meals per week.
And it turns out the number of meals you eat with others has an effect on your overall wellbeing. In fact, “there’s an optimal level of social eating,” says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, editor of the report and director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.
“The extent to which one shares meals,” says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Oxford and co-editor of the World Happiness Report, “is an extraordinary proxy for measuring people’s social connections and their social capital. It underpins people’s social support. It drives prosocial behaviors, and all of that, in turn, leads it to be a very strong indicator — predictor — for people’s life satisfaction.”
But how important is eating together to our happiness? This is the question that I and my co-authors answer in the World Happiness Report 2025. In our new data and analysis we looked at the link between how often people share meals and whether they feel good about their lives and experience positive emotions. We also documented that there was a massive difference between countries and regions when it came to how often people shared meals.
People who share meals with others have higher levels of life satisfaction than those who dine alone, according to research.
In the UK, people on average dine with others for seven of their meals each week – four dinners and three lunches, data suggested.
Researchers said the data on meal sharing had been “collected and analysed at a global scale” and remarked that their findings were surprising in the “strength of the connection of meal sharing with positive life evaluations and emotions”.
The research was carried out as part of the The World Happiness Report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.