Despite our high level of prosperity, our country still ranks as one of the least happiest countries analyzed by the site.
Supporting the idea that people in richer countries are less happy, the site has analyzed that Qatar achieves a HPI score of 25.2, ranking #149 of all the countries analyzed, despite having a GDP per capita ($PPP) of 80,944, more than 1.7x the USA's.
Costa Rica has a HPI score of 64.0, ranking #01 of all other countries analyzed, has a GDP per capita ($PPP) of 11,569, which is around a quarter of the USA's.
Despite their low level of prosperity, they're still the happiest country analyzed by the site.
This shows that living in a prosperous country may not necessarily bring happiness and living in poverty may not cause one to be unhappy.
However, there are still exceptions where prosperous countries are also happy. For example, according to the site stated above, Norway achieves a HPI score of 51.4, ranking #29 of all the countries analyzed, and has a GDP per capita ($PPP) of 57,231, more than 1.2 times the USA's.
These data prove that although most of the time, rich does not mean happy, there are rare occasions where rich countries feel a high level of joy in life.
In spite of being a relatively prosperous country, I feel that we are not a happy country. This is because of the large amount of time spent on work and studies, causing us to have very little time for leisure activities or just a proper break to get a good rest. Due to our overly competitive society and having the fear to lose ('kiahsu'), we are constantly working harder to upgrade ourselves further, causing us to spend almost all our time on work and having little or no time to enjoy ourselves, or just to catch a breather from our packed schedules and huge workload. For students, apart from school work, we are still involved in external activities that our parents send us to, like music and martial arts lessons, which is squeezed into our already-tight schedule, making it more packed and causing us to have even more things to stress about and much less time for ourselves. Therefore, I feel that our country's prosperity is the result of the sacrifice of our happiness. For prosperity, we become competitive and slog ourselves out to fight to become the best, causing us to have almost no time to enjoy life, and even receive pressure from ourselves and everyone else, making us unhappy, but wealthy. Also, being wealthy adds to our stress as we guard ourselves against everyone, questioning to ourselves whether people have motives for befriending us. The lack of trust and true relationships adds to our unhappiness. Due to the factors I have stated and supporting evidence from the HPI score site, I conclude that although Singapore is prosperous, we are an unhappy country.
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