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Global Emotions Survey: How’s Your Sense of Well-Being These Days?

David Langness | Jan 21, 2025

PART 3 IN SERIES The Hopeful Baha'i Vision of the Future

The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the authoritative views of the Baha'i Faith.

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David Langness | Jan 21, 2025

PART 3 IN SERIES The Hopeful Baha'i Vision of the Future

The views expressed in our content reflect individual perspectives and do not represent the authoritative views of the Baha'i Faith.

The Baha’i Faith offers a promise of boundless hope to this darkened world. In a speech he gave in New York City in 1912, Abdu’l-Baha linked this boundless hope to a boundless Creator:

God is infinite; the works of God are infinite; the bestowals of God are infinite. As His divinity is eternal, His lordship and perfections are without end. As the bounty of the Holy Spirit is eternal, we can never say that His bestowals terminate, else He terminates. If we think of the sun and then try to conceive of the cessation of the solar flame and heat, we have predicated the nonexistence of the sun. For separation of the sun from its rays and heat is inconceivable. Therefore, if we limit the bestowals of God, we limit the attributes of God and limit God.

Let us then trust in the bounty and bestowal of God. Let us be exhilarated with the divine breath, illumined and exalted by the heavenly glad tidings. God has ever dealt with man in mercy and kindness. He Who conferred the divine spirit in former times is abundantly able and capable at all times and periods to grant the same bestowals. Therefore, let us be hopeful. The God Who gave to the world formerly will do so now and in the future. 

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Baha’is firmly believe that the future of humanity will reveal a bright and shining reality. However — if a dark sense of hopelessness pervades your thinking these days, you’re definitely not alone. 

Those feelings, common in every country on Earth, have become so widespread that economists, political scientists, and futurists have begun to study them seriously and even use them to predict the future of entire nations and regions.

Traditionally, we’ve used “hard” economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP), unemployment data, or average household income to measure the overall health of our countries. But those purely materialistic measures fail to gauge a vastly more important one: how people feel. 

Do people feel secure and safe, or do they feel hungry and desperate? Do they feel optimistic about the future or deeply pessimistic? Are they angry? Do they have hope?

More than a decade ago, the Gallup Organization decided to begin measuring what their pollsters and scientists call “Global Emotions” — the collective sense of well-being we all feel or don’t feel. Gallup’s polling, in 160 countries around the world, gauges how people feel about the interconnected elements we usually think of as our well-being: our quality of life, our general health, our work, our social networks, our engagement in life, and most importantly, our hope for the future. 

World leaders use these metrics as a way to determine how their citizens rate their own sense of optimism or pessimism, which can and often does determine the entire future of a nation or a global region. 

Gallup’s Global Emotions survey asks many questions but focuses on two main ones. The survey asks them this way:

Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? 

Just your best guess, on which step do you think you will stand in the future, say about five years from now?

The answers to these questions have gotten a great deal of attention, so you may have seen the top-line results of Gallup’s global surveys covered in the media. Typically, when the media does report on them, we hear about the countries with the highest life evaluations on that hypothetical ladder, or “happiness indexes:” Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Canada, etc. We rarely hear about the countries in the middle or on the low end of the scale: the United States, for example, has relatively middling average happiness scores; while countries with active wars, conflicts, and widespread food insecurities rank lowest, as you might expect.

Would you like to take the survey and rate your own life and your sense of emotional well-being? If you do, here’s how the Gallup pollsters classify the survey’s respondents:

Those who rate their present life a 7 or higher and their life in five years an 8 or higher are classified as thriving, while those who rate both dimensions a 4 or lower are considered suffering. Respondents whose ratings fall in between are considered struggling. 

After you’ve decided to assign a state-of-mind number to your own rung on that “best possible life” ladder, you should know one un-reported and very important factor regarding these measurements. Even the two highest-ranked nations in the world (Denmark and Iceland, at 70%) barely edged out of the struggling category and into the thriving one. 

Starkly, people from every other country in the world collectively describe themselves and their potential futures as either struggling or suffering. This reflects a deep pessimism about our expectations for the future. Despite our world’s relative prosperity, development, and technological advances, hope seems to be in relatively short supply in most places.

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Baha’is believe that hope comes from knowledge, especially the knowledge that true faith gives about our prospects for future peace, unity, and happiness. Because faith means hope for the future, and because the word faith means “to trust,” the Baha’i teachings ask us to trust in God’s love and mercy for humanity. In the Baha’i writings, Abdu’l-Baha reassured us:

The day is fast approaching when the light of love will have dispelled the darkness of animosity and the splendours of the sun of truth will have driven away the gloomy night. This spirit of heavenly fellowship, this uprightness of the friends of God will promote the well-being and tranquillity of all mankind. Warring factions will become peaceful, opposing kindreds friendly, hostile peoples reconciled, and aggressive nations united. This is the imperishable glory of the human world. This is the supreme illumination in the kingdom of the Lord of Mercy.

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Comments

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  • Wendy Scott
    Feb 4, 2025
    -
    It is true that if we look around, we can find it hard to believe all this will ever get much better, but we have to trust that our Faith does promise it. A friend set to music for group singing part of the passage you quoted from 'Abdu'l-Bahá: "Let us then trust in the bounty and bestowal of God. Let us be exhilarated with the divine breath, illumined and exalted by the heavenly glad tidings." So yes, let us then trust. :)
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