Why Are Europeans (So Much) Happier Than Americans?

What Makes a Society a Genuinely Happy Place — and How America Got it Wrong

umair haque
Eudaimonia and Co
Published in
9 min readAug 12, 2019

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There’s a question that deserves to be thought about — which we don’t consider often enough. It’s a simple one. Why are Europeans so much happier than Americans? Or, conversely, why are Europeans the happiest people in the world…in human history?

Some caveats. Sure, I generalize. Not every European is happy. And by happiness I don’t mean simple consumerist pleasure. Nor is every American unhappy.

And yet the proof’s in the pudding. European societies, by and large, are astoundingly happy places. They’ve been rocked by the tides of extremism, sweeping the globe, sure — nobody is saying they’re perfect or pure, romanticizing or idealizing them. In contrast, Americans are so unhappy that suicide is skyrocketing, depression is soaring, rage is endemic, and the general atmosphere of society veers grimly between a kind of bitter despair and a black nihilism.

Now, one answer to my question is obvious: social democracy. Europeans enjoy generous public goods — public healthcare, retirement, education, high speed rail, and so forth. And so they don’t live the lives of bruising, battering, endless — and pointless — competition that Americans do. Americans work until their dying days now — the average American dies in debt. Europeans, in contrast, simply gave each other the very things Americans forced one another to compete for — healthcare, retirement, and so on. The stakes in American life are therefore life and death, every single day — lost that job? Bang! You’re dead. European life is gentler — because social democracy is fundamentally more humane.

But I want to go a little deeper. What is it that moves societies in a socially democratic direction? What lights the spark of social democracy?

I’ve come to see that Europeans have much — much — more human contact than Americans do. They are much less isolated — but they are also able to be together not just more, but in better ways. The contact that they have with one another is fundamentally different, of a far richer and and more substantial and fundamental kind, too. Let me explain.

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