Satisfaction with Life: Hungarians at the bottom of the scale

Hungarians are tailenders regarding their Satisfaction with Life (SWL) in Europe, and they are the least happy around their 50th age. You can also find the happiest and the unhappiest regions of Hungary in the article.

Even Romanians are more satisfied

According to the Eurostat, Hungarians are not too satisfied with their life. Among the 32 countries in which the European Union’s statistical office was doing a survey lately, Hungary is again at the bottom of the scale – hvg.hu reported.

As we reported before, people’s morale was 6.2 in 2013 on a scale ranging from 0 to 10 and it increased only to 6.41 by 2016. However, this number is still among the lowest in Europe.

From the 9 former socialist, but now EU-member republics

of Central- and Eastern-Europe, citizens are more satisfied with their life than the Hungarians in 7 countries. Not only the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania have higher numbers than Hungary but also Poland, Latvia and even Romania.

Still, there are considerable differences among the 32 countries being part of the survey. While in Scandinavia, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland people marked their situation as comforting

a significant frustration can be detected in the Southern-European countries.

It can be stated that generally, and not surprisingly, younger generations are more satisfied with their life than older ones. Interestingly, this tendency breaks in Hungary at the age of 50 and in the case of the men. Young pensioners (65-74 years old) are more satisfied with their life than people between 55-64 years who even have lower SWL points than the generation above 74 years. This might be because they are already

tired or even suffering from burnout;

however, they still have to work long years until they can retire.

In fact, the survey mentioned above was done together with the 2016 microcensus.

People of Budapest are happier

The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) has been used heavily as a measure of the life satisfaction component of subjective well-being. Scores on the SWLS have been shown to correlate with measures of mental health, and be predictive of future behaviours such as suicide attempts.

We wrote HERE that the population’s satisfaction rates had increased in most European capitals and Budapest’s population feels like their standard of life bettered, too. The most satisfied were the dwellers of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, where the rate of satisfied people grew by 5 pc, thus reaching 98% in total. Even though Athens’s 2012 56 pc rate rose to 71 pc in 2015 with a record increase of 15 pc, the population of the Greek capital is the least satisfied with their living conditions in the EU. Looking at the most significant gains, Athens is followed by Budapest, where the 84 pc of 2012 raised to 90 pc in 2015. As a result, the Hungarian capital was in the middle field of the EU capitals then. In fact, the 90 pc satisfaction rate was also valid for Bratislava’s population and the Latvian capital city, Riga, was the next on the list with 89 pc.

In 2013, Hungarians’ overall life satisfaction was also below the European Union average, it barely reached 6.2, the same as in the case of the Greeks, Cypriots and Portuguese. The EU average life overall indicator came to 7.1 then, and the highest score of 8 was set by Denmark, Finland and Sweden, while the lowest score of 4.8 by Bulgaria.

HERE we wrote about the happiest and unhappiest regions of Hungary.

Source: hvg.hu