Up and down

In YemenThe poorest country in the Gulf region is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. , more than 80% of people live below the international poverty lineThe International Poverty Line represents the international equivalent of what .90 could buy in the United States of America in 2011. . Four and a half million are internally displacedPeople who have had to leave their homes in one part of a country and move to another part of the same country, often due to war. , and 17 million are food insecure.¹

The UK, meanwhile, is in the top 25 richest countries, with a GDPShort for Gross Domestic Product, the measure of all the goods and services produced inside a country. per capita around 66 times higher than Yemen's.² But if you went around BirminghamA major city in England. It has a population of more than one million. and the Yemeni capital of Sana'a and asked people how happy they were, you would get a surprising result.

Britain is the second-most miserable country in the world, according to a new survey. The nation is unhappier not only than Yemen, which placed ninth, but also than South Africa and Egypt, both in the middle of crippling economic crises, and Ukraine, fighting an existential war. Only UzbekistanA Central Asian nation and former Soviet republic, home to nearly 35 million people. is more agonised.

Perhaps this is not so surprising, some say. Human beings think not in the absolute, but in the relative. If things are still good but getting worse, we tend to be unhappier than if they are just staying bad.

And it is hard to deny things are in decline. Average incomes have stagnatedStopped growing. for 15 years.³ Public services have been decimated. Three quarters of Britons think the country is becoming a worse place to live.⁴

Others say Britons are genetically hardwired to be down. Research has found that the British and French have a "shorter" version of the gene that regulates serotoninA chemical messenger believed to boost people's mood. , the "happiness chemical", compared with other nationalities, like the Danes.⁵

Denmark consistently scores highly for happiness while Britain and France report low satisfaction.

Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. Visitors to the UK, especially from the sunny, upbeat USA, often marvel at how British people seem to relish their own misery. American journalist Eric Weiner once wrote that Brits "derive a perverse pleasure from their grumpiness". Perhaps being miserable is what makes us happy.

But others say we should not vaunt our own despondency. They say it stops us from getting anything done.

For example, some hope that by telling people it is almost too late to stop climate breakdown, it might shake them out of their complacency. Instead, research shows it just makes them fatalisticThe idea that all events are due to fate and cannot be changed with action. and less likely to do anything.

In contrast, if they are shown practical ways in which we can stop it in a hopeful light, they become more concerned about the crisis.

A leading philosopher Toby Ord has even come up with a new mathematical formula (ironically called the "Simple Model" since it is extremely complex) that aims to prove pessimism is a waste of time.

Yet others think our pessimism might be an unavoidable sign of the times. If you ask people in the UK and France if things are getting better, less than five in every hundred people will say yes. But in China, where nearly 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 40 years, 41% agree things are improving.⁶

As for Yemen, for weeks now they have been centre of the global stage because of the HouthisAn Islamist rebel group that controls a large part of Yemen. They are allies of Hamas in Gaza. ' attacks on Red SeaA seawater inlet of the Indian Ocean. To its right is Saudi Arabia, to its left the coast of north Africa. shipping in support of GazaThe smaller of two Palestinian territories, home to two million people. It is located on the Mediterranean coast, bordered by Israel and Egypt. . It is a country that is undoubtedly shaping the future of world affairs.

So perhaps, they say, Britons' miserabilism is not ingrained. It is an unconscious recognition of a geopolitical fact: that the country has had its day, and the future will be made by other parts of the world.

Is pessimism pointless?

Yes: There is no point in denying things are going badly. But you will not solve anything by wallowing in your own misery. People will only work to make them better if they have reason to hope.

No: A can-do attitude is not going to solve deep underlying economic issues. Britain is facing a problem that goes back decades. So we might as well be clear-eyed about its scale.

Or: A dissatisfaction with the state of life is part of British culture. But it was not always like that: the nation used to be known as "Merry England". Perhaps Brits can get back that sense of joy without losing their distinctiveness.