Zukunftsangst! Fear of (and Hope for) the Future and its Impact on Life Satisfaction.

Abstract

Abstract:The thoughts that an individual has about the future contribute substantially to their life satisfaction in a positive or negative direction. This is a result found via five different methods, some of which control for personality and disposition and the potential endogeneity of thoughts and life satisfaction. The reduction in life satisfaction experienced by individuals who report being pessimistic is greater than that for well-known objective statuses like unemployment. Including individuals' thoughts about the future substantially increases the explanatory power of standard life satisfaction models. Life satisfaction is made up of objective and subjective factors and methods exist to account for their potential endogeneity to enhance our understanding of well-being. This investigation is an example of such an analysis combining a subjective factor, thoughts about the future (treated as endogenous), with more standard objective factors to aid understanding regarding well-being.

Happiness, Work, and Identity

“…Similar results have been found for Australia (Shields et al 2009), South Africa (Powdthavee 2007), and Germany (Clark et al 2010). At first glance, one might have expected the opposite effect, as a high unemployment rate points to bad individual prospects of finding a new job, making unemployed people feel even more anxious about the future and thus less satisfied with their lives (Piper 2014). However, the regional unemployment rate also leads to changes in the strength of the prescription P to work when in working age, which in turn affects the identity component Ij: When the regional unemployment rate is high, being employed is less of a norm among people in the working-age group.…”

Adaptation to Precarious Prosperity: Is it Resignation?

“…QOL is assessed by socioeconomic living conditions in various life domains 2 and people's evaluation thereof (Noll 1999;Stiglitz et al 2009). Structural and biographical events change living conditions; additionally, research highlights the importance of past experiences, present opportunities (Felce and Perry 1995), and the future (Piper 2014) with regard to the perception of opportunities to improve QOL. According to Zapf (1984), QOL is defined here as good living conditions that accompany positive subjective well-being.…”