Han van der Maas | The apparent paradoxes of student well-being
Students today seem to be increasingly unhappy. Columnist Han van der Maas wonders why this is. “According to the happiness paradox, the explicit pursuit of happiness leads to less happiness.”
You’re young and clever, you’re studying at one of the best universities in one of the most charming cities in liberal Europe, and yet... you are unhappy. You might just have gone through a break up, or maybe you’re ill or your lease is up, or maybe you’ve failed an exam again – all of which gives you licence to be unhappy.
However, according to the literature on subjective well-being (30,000 articles in the year 2022), well-being is not always related to objectives issues. In the 1970s, women in the United States reported a significantly greater degree of happiness than men. Since that time, the position of women has objectively improves, however their ‘happiness’ has decreased, occasionally to below the level of that of men. Women also report more serious mental health problems and make more suicide attempts than men, despite the fact that suicide mortality among men is two to four times higher than in women.
The Easterlin paradox is equally perplexing: within a country, wealth is correlated with happiness, however it is not between countries. As countries become more prosperous they do not demonstrate an increase in their general level of happiness. There are many more such paradoxes or actually counter-intuitive results around. For example, many choices often make people unhappy and they overestimate the duration of the impact of positive (winning the lottery) and negative events (the end of a relationship). According to the happiness paradox, the explicit pursuit of happiness in fact leads to less happiness.
A great many of these paradoxes are reflected in student well-being. Not only is there very little time for idleness, doing nothing is no longer an option. Life must be lived to the fullest and what qualifies as the fullest is determined by social media. It is quite conceivable that students in the 1970s, just like women in the USA, were objectively worse off and yet nevertheless reported a greater degree of happiness.
The data on student well-being is notoriously unreliable. There is a dearth of truly representative data. Nor are we sure whether student well-being has in fact declined, although this is not unlikely. There are far more female students than 75 years ago and sexual violence is an objective reason for a lower degree of well-being. Female students are disproportionately likely to be the victims of sexual violence.
I applaud the recently published Student Pact on sexual harassment and sexual violence. I believe one of the best suggestions is the rule: ‘It’s either a clear Yes – or nothing’. The paradoxes of subjective well-being are no excuse to combat objective causes of decreased well-being.
