“Happy,” the 2013 hit song written, produced, and performed by American singer Pharrell Williams, has a whole new meaning in New Jersey’s Capital City as Trenton, NJ was recently named among the 20 happiest U.S. Cities by SeniorLiving.org.
According to SeniorLiving.org, “part of understanding whether you’re happy is getting your arms around what makes you happy, which, though it may vary a bit from person to person, generally involves a few common threads: relationships with other people, income (particularly disposable income), leisure time and physical health.”
“We wanted to understand how different cities across the United States rate when it comes to residents’ potential for happiness, so we looked at hundreds of cities across an array of economic, health, social and other metrics to see how much better (or worse) they have it than the average American,” according to the report. “What we found was that there were nearly two dozen cities that tend to have happiness metrics that are far better than what the average American experiences.”
For each city, the study calculated a percentage over or under the overall national rate for each category and then averaged each city’s over/under percentage to calculate that city’s overall average percentage. In this formula, lower numbers are better. According to the stud, the average percentage for all 180+ cities was 99.4%, and exactly 20 cities had overall average percentages of at least 10 percentage points better than that.
About half of the cities in the analysis had averages that were better than the overall average, but the study focused on those that performed much better than the average city. In other words, the 20 happiest places in the United States.
The full study can be found here: https://www.seniorliving.org/research/20-happiest-us-cities/
