Diener et al. (2019) makes some statements that suggest that life satisfaction isn’t a great proxy for subjective well-being:
In the current article, we review evidence from the first representative sample of humanity, the Gallup World Poll, and include many more nations that are very poor and troubled. We find that the majority of people are above neutral in affect balance but not life satisfaction.
people around the globe are more likely to score in the negative zone on judgment measures of life satisfaction than on experiential measures—life satisfaction versus affect balance. We found more negative scores for life satisfaction than for affect balance. This might be because affect balance tends to depend more on the meeting of universal needs, such as for social support, and societies on the whole have developed reasonably good methods for meeting these needs, even when poverty or even conflict are present. In contrast, life satisfaction depends on comparing one’s life to standards that change to some degree with culture and expectancies. Thus, many people in our sample might have scored low on life satisfaction because they desire the material life they perceive in wealthy nations, and conclude that they fall far short of this standard. It could be that life satisfaction is more influenced by movable standards compared with affect, and this means that even after substantial progress, people may believe that they fall short of their goals (Graham & Pettinato, 2006). The divergent patterns of the results for life satisfaction and for affect balance highlight the importance of measuring multiple aspects of SWB (Diener, 1984).
It also suggests that lacking material needs and lacking social support have a large impact on happiness, so it might be worthwhile to look into improving that in addition to working on mental illness:
Are there circumstances in which most people are no longer happy? To answer this question, we selected the respondents who had experienced five adverse events during the past year: (a) had been assaulted, (b) had property or money stolen, (c) had health problems, (d) did not have enough money for food, and (e) did not have enough money for shelter. In this group, only 26% of respondents (n = 796) evaluated their life as above 5, and only 51% (n = 1,567) reported more positive than negative affect. Thus, life circumstances may override the natural coping responses that most mentally healthy people possess. Finally, we examined people who had the above five
adverse life events but also two other negative social circumstances—(a) nobody they could call on for support in an emergency and (b) feeling that they were not respected.4 Thus, this group had experienced physical and material problems during the past year as well as lack of social support. In this group of unfortunate individuals, only 20% had a positive affect-balance score (n = 72), 10% had a neutral score (i.e., they experienced the same number of positive and negative feelings, n = 37), and 70% had a negative score (n = 257).
For life satisfaction, only 12% (n = 43) had a score above neutral, 14% (n = 51) were at the neutral point, and 74% (n = 271) were below the neutral point. Thus, we found that most individuals who experienced very negative life events and lacked social support were far from happy. Although most people in the globe were happy, those who experienced physical, financial, and interpersonal problems were not.
Diener, E., Diener, C., Choi, H., & Oishi, S. (2018). Revisiting “Most People Are Happy”—And Discovering When They Are Not. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 166–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618765111
Diener et al. (2019) makes some statements that suggest that life satisfaction isn’t a great proxy for subjective well-being:
It also suggests that lacking material needs and lacking social support have a large impact on happiness, so it might be worthwhile to look into improving that in addition to working on mental illness:
Diener, E., Diener, C., Choi, H., & Oishi, S. (2018). Revisiting “Most People Are Happy”—And Discovering When They Are Not. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(2), 166–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618765111