What A Day - Quantifying Happiness In 2026

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

Unemployment is up. Two-thirds of Americans have recently struggled with the rising cost of groceries. And the President of the United States has occupied his time attempting to start a land war in Venezuela, posting on the internet, and blowing up the East Wing of the White House. Times are… tough. So what can we do, as individuals and as a society, to be happier? To find out, we spoke to Michael Plant. He’s the founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute, a nonprofit that researches the most cost-effective ways to improve wellbeing around the world.And in headlines, unemployment surges to its highest rate in four years, the deadline to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies draws dangerously near, and Vice President J.D. Vance asks Americans for patience during a speech in Pennsylvania.Show Notes: Check out the Happier Lives Institute – www.happierlivesinstitute.orgCall Congress – 202-224-3121Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's Wednesday, December 17th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is what a day. The show saying thank you to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles for deciding, you know what? I'm going to talk to a writer from Vanity Fair 11 times this year and just tell him everything I'm thinking about President Donald Trump's quote, Alcoholics' personality and Elon Musk's drug use and, oh, by the way, Trump being in the Epstein files, nothing's off limits. I'm sure this will all go great. It did. On today's show, unemployment surges to its highest rate in four years, which is sad. And the deadline to extend affordable care act subsidies draws dangerously near.

Also very sad. But let's start with happiness? I know. It's a weird topic to talk about right now when there is so much to be justifiably unhappy about. As I said, unemployment is up. Two-thirds of Americans have recently struggled with the rising cost of groceries, and the president of the United States is occupied his time attempting to start a land war in Venezuela, posting on the Internet and blowing up the east wing of the White House. Times are tough. It's no wonder, then, that the Common Good Institute, a nonpartisan public policy

think tank, found that the U.S. fell from 11th place to 24th place in global happiness rankings between 2012 and 2025. More and more Americans are deeply, profoundly unhappy, especially younger Americans. So, what do we do about it? And I mean that. What can we do as individuals and as a society to be happier? Besides flipping the House and Senate, believe me, I got there before you did. To find out, I spoke to Michael Plant.

He's the founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute, a nonprofit that research is the most cost-effective ways to improve well-being around the world. Michael, welcome to Waday. Thank you for having me on. So I'm a little skeptical of a lot of the happiness studies I've seen. So let's start at a very basic level. What has your research led you to believe happiness is? Well, happiness is feeling good overall. But in the science of well-being, there are quite a few different measures of happiness. So the sort of standard one is life satisfaction. How do you feel about your life overall? So you're probably familiar with the idea the Nordic countries are the happiest on earth. That's based on this measure of life

satisfaction. And then there's a kind of experiential measure. That's what we tend to mean in happiness in ordinary language. That's how good or bad do you feel? Those are the main two. How do you research or scientifically analyze something that feels so abstract? Actually, researching happiness is much easier than people think. It turns out that if you want to find how happy someone is, you just ask them, how happy are you zero to ten? It's the sort of solution hiding in plain sight. And this contrasts with how we often try and work out how people's lives are going, which is effectively we look in their wallets and then we tell them how their lives are. And this is to generalizes to our approach to social welfare, where we think that what

makes a society going well or badly is just its level of GDP. I think to that point, as you know, we're at a pretty tumultuous time in the US. A lot of people are fighting just to afford basic necessities. And you mentioned that in the UK as well. The political climate is volatile. and lawmakers are not delivering fixes for the issues Americans care about the most, and they're just screaming at each other all the time, generally on the internet. How much do things like the economy and politics play into our happiness? Yeah, so it's an important role. What we're sensitive to is how we feel like our circumstances are changing, again, compared to our expectations. So America has been getting steadily less happy since Records began. Where Records

began was 1972, the US General Social Survey. And I think I would be bold enough to say that probably part of the reason that you have your current president is because happiness has been going down over that time period. So there's new research that came out this year in the World Happiness Report, which finds that when people are dissatisfied with their lives, they're more likely to vote for populist presidents. If you have low trust in other people, you're more like to vote for right-wing populace. If you have highly trusted other people, but you're dissatisfied with lives, you're more likely to vote for left-wing populace. So that's kind of Trump and maybe Sanders, perhaps. So if people felt like their lives were going better, they would

want to keep the status quo. But if you feel like your life is going poorly, then, you know, you're prepared to have a swing with something else. In a society like the U.S. or the U.K., how do you refocus on non-material things as a meter or metric for happiness? That's a great question. So if you remember the U.S. Declaration of Independence, what are some of the key words that we have these inalienable rights? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And then Thomas Jefferson said in 1810 that human happiness and the care of life are the only legitimate objects of good government. So I think we should get back to happiness. We got sidetracked in the 20th century where we focused on GDP and the economy. But now there is a new happiness of science.

That really started in the 70s. It's grown up since. Most of the world's wealthiest countries, with I think the exception of America, measure well-being as part of their national statistics. They might not sound very exciting. But if you don't measure it, then you can't capture it and you won't make it a priority. So if we can start to put happiness first in our lives, in our government policies, then that will eventually translate to people's lives improving to our people.

society's feeling more kind of civil and harmonious. So I think a better future is possible. What do happy people have in common? Well, there are quite a few things which are the research shows as the main determinants of happiness. It's things like having good mental and physical health, having a job, having a job that you enjoy, being in a relationship, there'll be exercise, friendship, these sorts of things. So the things we think are important, are borne out by happiness research, but what happiness research does show us is that there's differences between how important we think these things are. So income has a surprisingly low effect in happiness research compared to things like mental health. And you can capture better the impact

of the human aspects of life than you would do if you were just looking at sort of standard economic measures like GDP. And if all of that is established, you have a job, you exercise, you eat right, you get enough sleep. What has your research found that can make people actually happy beyond those essentials? Then your attitude is going to play quite a big role. So do you find things to be grateful for? Do you connect with others? Do you live a life which you feel is meaningful?

So lots of the kind of current discourse around self-help, what's the popular book, The Let Them Theory, is quite focused on just focus on your own life. and forget about other people. And that's really not what the happiness research says. Our lives are happier if we feel useful to other people. And if we feel connected, we feel part of something larger than ourselves. You can think about volunteering, participating in political activity, in work where you feel like you're making a difference.

So Jane, you probably feel like you're doing a job which matters. So you can have jobs, which matter. So different people search for happiness, advice in different circumstances. But if your life is going quite well and you're thinking, oh, I'm not really happy, it's probably because you don't have enough meaning or purpose in your life. And getting yourself a larger salary, a nicer car, a fancier iPhone is only going to make a temporary difference to how you feel. I think a question I've always had is, are there some people who are naturally happy or naturally unhappy? Because I think that we've all met someone who is just kind of like, even in really difficult situations or something really bad happened, they seem to stay in an even keel in. comparatively happy. And then we've also met people who could be, you know, like the president of

the United States, who could have literally everything he wants and then has to get on his phone and deride talk show hosts and famous movie directors. Are there just people who are just naturally unhappy? Yeah, I mean, you have differences in personality traits. There's links between people's genetics, twin studies. So yeah, there is some heritability to your happiness, but, you know, you can't change your genes, but you can change how you think about life. You can change your activities. So yeah, some people get an unfair start in terms of how happy they are and the rest of us have to work at it. As we had in the 26, you've already given suggestions on how people can work towards happiness. But what would you say to people who are struggling to find happiness

right now? So a couple of different thoughts. If you're seriously unhappy, you might want to go and talk to a doctor. Mental health is very serious. That's more than just unhappiness. That's a particular kind of long-lasting unhappiness. In that case, we probably want to find a therapist. So that's if you're like really at the kind of low end. But I would say as we're getting into 2026, you want to think about what differences do you want to make to your life? Think about things which are actually you're going to enjoy, are going to make you happier and that you're likely to achieve. So, you know, if you aren't a marathon runner, then don't say to yourself, I'm now going to run a marathon because you'll just end up being disappointed. You should be realistic. But instead, you might want to think about something like, okay, what's an activity I think I would enjoy, but I just haven't got around to it. Like maybe you want to go dancing or, you know, making clay pots or drawing art, whatever it is. But I do something that allows you to connect with other people and to do something where, again, it feels useful. But probably something that you haven't tried before. And then something I would say particularly to Americans is that part of what's related to the lowering of happiness in the US is that people are more socially isolated.

So if you look at the number of people who are eating alone, that's shot up in the US over the last couple of decades. So ask a colleague out for lunch, try and talk to other people, think about how you can interact with people on a daily basis, kind of improve the social fabric. and I think you will find that that makes you happy and that helps other people as well. Michael, it made me really happy, actually, for you to join me, so thank you. You're welcome. That was my conversation with Michael Plant,

founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute. We'll get to more of the news in the moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What a day is brought to you by Zybiotics pre-alcohol. From holiday parties to festive toasts by the fire,

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Zbiotics is backed with a 100% money-back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to Zbiotics.com slash Wad and use a code Watt at checkout for 15% off. Here's what else we're following today. Headlines.

President Trump last week gave his economy a grade of A plus plus plus plus. What grade would you give the economy today? A plus plus plus. Hmm. One last plus. Suspicious. Job numbers are finally in and despite the confidence exuding from Vice President, J.D. Vance about the economy, data shows the labor market is losing momentum. The unemployment rate

rose to 4.6% last month, the highest since 2021. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. lost 105,000 jobs in October, then gained 64,000 jobs in November. The new data published Tuesday comes up to delays due to the government shutdown. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told CNBC it's best to squint your eyes and look at the October and November numbers combined. And if you do that, then you're looking at private sector gains of about 120,000, maybe 121, and then we dropped about 160,000 government workers, federal government workers, who are the people who took the buyout that, you know, we began that program in the spring and gave people to the fall to step aside. And so I think that from the private sector

point of view, it's just about what we've been getting all year. It's solid upward trajectory. You know, if you just sort of ignore the actual numbers, the numbers are great. President Trump echoed the sentiment on True Social Tuesday, writing, quote, the best is yet to come. Maybe in two weeks. After 11 months, again, the average American family is $1,000 richer than they were 11 months ago. Now, if you had $3,000 taken out of your pocket by the Biden administration, of course you're still struggling to get by.

Rome was not built in a day. And neither was that explanation. Vice President J.D. Vance asked for patience from Americans during a speech in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. The stop in Lehigh Valley was part of a larger White House attempt to get its economic story straight, as voter frustration over high costs continues to chip away at Republicans standing ahead of the 26 midterms. Unlike Trump, who appeared in the state a week earlier, Vance generally stayed on message and avoided calling affordability itself a hoax. But he didn't forget the one man dying to solve the last. the problem he thinks isn't real.

I promise you, there is no person more impatient to solve the affordability crisis than Donald J. Trump, the president of the United States. Vance is right. We unearthed recent footage of Trump barely containing his efforts to solve the affordability crisis. I think it'll be one of the great forums anywhere in the world. It's about $300 million. Just like Vance said, rebuilding Rome, one brick at a time. The House is expected to hold a vote on a GOP health care package today.

What is not as certain as of Tuesday evening is whether House Speaker Mike Johnson will allow a vote on an amendment to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, which some moderate Republican lawmakers are advocating for. The enhanced subsidies are set to expire at the end of the year, all but guaranteeing higher health insurance premiums for millions of Americans. New York Republican Representative Mike Lawler told reporters the decision not to have a vote on extending the subsidies is, quote, absolute bullshit.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said during a press conference that while their fights hard for New York, but... The districts are different. They have different priorities and ideas, but we do have, there's about a dozen members in the conference that are in these swing districts who are fighting hard to make sure that they reduce costs for all of their constituents. And many of them did want to vote on this Obamacare, you know, COVID-era subsidy the Democrats created. We looked for a way to try to allow for that pressure release valve. and it just was not to be.

Johnson, though, appears to be a little wishy-washy on the subject. According to the New York Times, the House Speaker later said, quote, there's a real possibility to get a vote on it, adding, quote, I've certainly tried my best to provide for that, so we'll see what happens. Inspiring. Breaking news. Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated. Again. I'm talking, of course, about the decision back in November to officially end production of the penny bearing his face.

Well, it turns out there's a difference between a face, and face value. Because according to Stax Bowers' galleries, a California coin auctioneer, sets of the final minted pennies were auctioned off for more than $16.7 million last week. The United States Mint said the auction featured 232 sets of three coins, each pairing two Philadelphia minted 2025 pennies, one standard and one made of 24-carat gold for some reason because who doesn't want a gold penny? And then another penny from the Denver Mint. The three coin sets marked with an omega symbol to denote the penny's final run, sold for an average of $72,000, with the very last set fetching $800,000.

That means for three pennies, someone paid the equivalent of 80 million pennies. That's 26.6 million pennies per penny! So in 2025, a penny's net worth is either one cent or 26.6 million cents? Huh. I guess there isn't a middle class when it comes to the penny either. And that's the news. Before we go, check out. Check out Crooked's legal podcast, strict scrutiny. Each week, Melissa, Leah, and Kate break down the court decisions and legal fights that actually shape how this country's run. This week, they're digging into a major Supreme Court Court. case that could give Trump more control over the federal government, along with other legal

battles tied to power, accountability, and who gets to make the rules. Listen to strict scrutiny wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, learn more about an app that's basically Tinder, for cows, and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about the Herd Plus app developed by the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation, which helps dairy farmers find their cows their perfect genetic match, like me. What Today is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com slash subscribe.

I'm Jane Koston, and how does one swipe with hooves? What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our producer is Caitlin Flummer. Our associate producers are Emily Four and Chris Alport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters and Matt Burke.

Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of News and Politics is Adrian Hill. We had helped from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Thank you.