A survey by McGill University, covering small rural communities globally, challenges the common belief that higher income equates to greater happiness. The study, which included nearly 3,000 people from 19 small communities, some self-identifying as Indigenous and all reliant on nature for their livelihoods, revealed that despite limited monetary resources (only 64% of households had cash income), many residents lead content and fulfilling lives.
Their happiness levels were found to be on par with those in affluent countries, despite histories of marginalization and oppression in these communities. This counters the usual trend seen in global polls linking higher incomes to greater life satisfaction in industrialized nations.
“This is good news for the environment because the results provide strong evidence that resource-intensive economic growth is not required to achieve high levels of subjective well-being,” the researchers explain.
Life satisfaction
In countries such as Fiji, Zimbabwe, and China, researchers requested survey participants to assess their life satisfaction on a scale of 0–10. The average life satisfaction across these communities hovered around seven out of 10, with four of the 19 sites scoring above eight out of 10.
These figures align with satisfaction levels seen in polls for affluent Scandinavian countries. However, it’s noteworthy that some communities rated their life satisfaction as low as five out of 10.
“Our research shows that the strong correlation frequently observed between income and life satisfaction is not universal and proves that wealth—as generated by industrialized economies—is not fundamentally required for humans to lead happy lives,” the researchers say.
“It has become very clear that we are a very social species, and that the nature of our interactions with other people and living things are enormously powerful determinants of how we see our lives, overall,” they conclude. “Therefore, we might imagine that there are quite different kinds of lives from the ones we pursue now which could also be highly fulfilling.”
