Would you rather live an exciting life or a calm life? That's the question Gallup asked representative samples of the public in 116 countries in partnership with the Wellbeing for Planet Earth Foundation. You might be happy to know that the overwhelming majority of the public in almost all of the surveyed countries would rather live a calm life.
Overall, 72 percent of respondents in the surveyed countries prefer calm to excitement. Only 16 percent opted for excitement and another 10 percent said they wanted both. In the U.S. and Canada, the figures were 75 percent for calm, 22 percent for excitement, and 3 percent for both.
Georgia is the only country in which the majority of the public says it would choose excitement over calm. In Vietnam, equal numbers opted for excitement and calm.
The pandemic may have something to do with the overwhelming preference for calm across the world. The pandemic's "extraordinary circumstances may have made living a calm life a more appealing prospect for many people than it would be otherwise," Gallup concludes, "especially given the ambiguous or complicated good represented by excitement."
Source: Gallup, The World Prefers a Calm Life to an Exciting Life
