World Happiness Report 2025 warns that more in the US are dining alone

Presenter: The World Happiness Report 2025 was released Thursday, and though the United States has dropped from 15th to 24th place since 2023, there’s one quick way to turn that around. Professor and director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve:

[00:00:20] Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (Wellbeing Research Centre): For the past 13 years, the World Happiness Report has always emphasized the social elements that underpin our human well-being and the way that people rate the quality of their lives and as measured thanks to the Gallup poll.

[00:00:34] So we’ve always looked beyond the usual suspects of income, GDP per capita, the way it’s distributed, and healthy life expectancies, and you will have noticed that social support plays such an important role. So in this year’s report, right here, we focused on the theme of ‘Care and sharing’ because we wanted to put more meat on the bone of that social support element.

[00:00:54] And in no small part, the whole theme of this year’s report was inspired by coming across a survey item in the Ajinomoto module that was part of the Gallup World Poll two years ago. And the specific item that had a real light bulb go off in our heads amongst the academics was an item that was asked:

[00:01:13] ‘Over the past week, how many of your lunches were shared with somebody else? And over the past week, how many of your dinners were shared with somebody else?’

[00:01:23] And that seemingly basic question, so close to home, immediately flashed in our heads: ‘Wait a second, this is a way of quasi-objectively measuring the strength of people’s social ties, their social capital, if you will, and the social support they can rely on as a result.’

[00:01:41] And lo and behold: huge variation around the world. There’s countries out there, where out of a possible 14 (so seven lunches, seven dinners shared), only about three or four are shared with others. And there’s countries out there, and Latin America as a region with the most of those, where the average is more like 11 or 12 out of 14 being shared.

[00:02:02] You’re starting to get a hint also why the Latin American countries, and specifically Mexico and Costa Rica, are moving up. They’re punching above their weight in terms of happiness, not because of GDP or because of healthy life expectancy, but because of the social ties and the quality of them that they have.

[00:02:19] Now, that was a general population well-being level insight, but if we look at the individual level around the world, just how powerful is this indicator for our social lives in driving well-being?

[00:02:32] That’s where the real surprise came for the academic team, because we knew social support and social connections were important. We didn’t know just how important they were. If you look at all individuals in the World Poll responding to this question and you tie it to their well-being, it turns out their correlation is as strong as their employment status and their relative income, which, by the way, is more important than absolute income in explaining life satisfaction. So hugely, hugely important, and huge variations between people and countries, and this helps explain differences in population well-being.

[00:03:07] The relationship is strong for everybody, between sharing meals and well-being. It is particularly strong for youth, as it turns out. If you slice and dice it by generations, the coefficient is stronger for people below 30. And this is where the following insights became very disturbing.

[00:03:24] In the United States, we benefit from the American Time Use Survey, where they have a similar item running for 20 years. It’s the one country that allowed us to dig a bit deeper and do a deep dive.

[00:03:35] What we found there was, sit tight, there’s been a 53% increase in dining alone in the United States over the past two decades, since 2003 to be precise. Even worse, if you slice and dice it by age groups, there is a 1.8, so 180% increase, almost a doubling, of dining alone for people below 30.

[00:04:00] And that has been picking up gradually, but steadily and increasingly so in the last five, six years. So, youth today in America are way more likely to be spending their lunches and dinners alone, and that’s really, really disconcerting.

[00:04:15] You may recognize this kind of language from a famous book by Robert Putnam, that some of you will be familiar with. He wrote in the early 2000s a book that became known as Bowling Alone. What we’re seeing here is essentially the Dining Alone version.

[00:04:31] More data, more granular, and the trends that he started raising alarm bells about, around the undermining of our social capital in our societies, those trends have only gotten worse since.

[00:04:44] And so I’m sorry to have to finish on this negative note, but the reality is that in this era of social isolation that we’re increasingly in, which is a driver of political polarization, that it is now absolutely essential to try and get people back around the table together, because that is vital for individual and collective well-being.

[00:05:07] Get back together around the dinner table. Make sure you’re present and try and share more lunches, breakfast, lunches, and dinners with other people.

[00:05:15] Now, fun fact, and I’ll finish on this. Is there an optimal number of shared meals? As it turns out, it’s not 14 out of 14, either. The optimal number of shared meals is 13 out of 14. So we do need a little bit of me-time.

[00:05:35] But clearly most of us, I presume even in this room, are not sharing 13 out of 14 meals together. And so there’s a lot of room for improvement, and a lot of policy, and a lot of organizational efforts to be put in place to get us to about 13 out of 14 together.

[00:05:49] Presenter: By measuring how many meals we share with others, the World Happiness Report 2025 confirms a continuing decline in social capital in the U.S., trends described 30 years ago by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone. On a positive note, this seems to be one area where we can all make a difference. For more, read Chapter 3 at WorldHappiness.Report, ‘How sharing meals with others supports happiness and social connections.’