Does Geography and Weather Impact Happiness?

Science says yes

Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles, CA

I'm not telling you to pack up and leave, but if you hate the climate (weather and political) where you currently live, you'll probably be happier if you do.

I'm in the process of writing my memoir about quitting my full-time job to live out of a backpack, and was surprised at how often the themes of claustrophobia and lack of sunlight poured out onto the page. I hadn't planned to write in such detail about small, dark spaces.

The first outline of the book focused mostly on the exciting bits about traveling around the world, with only a few initial chapters about my job and the process of quitting. But in workshopping initial chapters, readers all asked the same question: why did the narrator have such a strong desire to quit the life she knew and leave the place she lived?

The more I wrote, the more I realized I felt trapped — in a career I never wanted and in a physical environment my body rejected daily. Every cell screamed at me louder than movie theater voices for the Final Girl, imploring her, "Don't go upstairs!" I ignored it for far too long. My body needed warmth and sunshine. I suffocated in dark, frigid corners.

The cold, windy winters in Boston caused my rosacea to flare. While many with rosacea experience worsening symptoms in summer sun, winter is my enemy. Face so red and broken out, my skin hurt to touch it. My dermatologist put me on a steady state of antibiotics, and my general practitioner urged me to reconsider, given my stomach issues. My stomach issues worsened, so I ditched the pills and kept the red face.

February in Boston, MA

At my tech marketing job — the windowless cubicle farm where, had I been an egg-producing chicken, I wouldn’t qualify for free-range labeling — the sales guys asked, "You get sunburn from skiing?" No, bro, I've never skied.

The cold wasn't the only enemy. I craved the sun. New England is dark in winter, with about nine hours of daylight. Not enough for someone like me with seasonal depression who wants to stay inside and eat mac & cheese from Oct-March. And when forced to leave the house, feels nothing but anger and bone-tingling cold that turns my extremities blue.

If you've ever lived in New England and thought winters elsewhere couldn't be worse, you're wrong. Rochester, NY, where I grew up, all of western NY, is a fall/winter/spring wasteland. Over 200 days of the year are classified as "mostly cloudy," putting it in the top ten list of gloomy US cities.

11 AM on a cloudy day, Rochester, NY

I was reminded of just how gray the city is when I arrived in March of 2020 to stay with my parents (I had been digital nomading it before the pandemic). On my flight in, I saw only blue skies above a horizontal wall of clouds. As the plane descended, it looked like we were nose-diving into a tangled gray mass with zero visibility. Down, down. Then suddenly, out of the haze, the ground appeared, seemingly just a few feet below before touching down.

That was the Rochester I remembered from childhood. In those spring months, I woke up to overcast skies minutes before morning Zoom calls. A May walk around the tiny suburban cul-de-sac, but there was no light, physically or metaphorically. Outside in multiple layers to stay warm, the clouds were too gray, too dense, too low, like the drop ceilings in my old windowless office. They hung so low in the sky that I wondered if I could stand on my tip toes and reach through them. Could I stretch a bit higher to grab the sun and pull it down?

After spending the previous three years in warmer, sunnier locations, especially along the Mediterranean and Adriatic, I was more miserable than I had been in a long time.

It wasn't only the soul-crushing pandemic that weighed heavily; it was the weather, lack of sunshine, and lack of places to go for walks. I spent my thirties slowly realizing I couldn't live where I lived anymore. Gradually, the awakening came. But after you leave a toxic situation (whatever that is, relationship, job, even climate), you simply can't go back to tolerating it for even a short time.

After a few months in Rochester, I fled to sunnier (by contrast) NYC. I lasted nine months. When I saw a listing for a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, I bought it without viewing it in person. A friend video-conferenced me while doing a walkthrough, and I made an offer the next day. I drained all but $57 from my bank account for the down payment. Zero regrets (the house needed more work than I anticipated, but I don't regret moving to LA).

Southern California sunshine is everything. I cannot emphasize this enough. A few weeks into living in LA, I started going for regular walks around the Silverlake Reservoir and Griffith Park, including my favorite hike up to the observatory. LA is a wild, difficult place, but I did not care because the sun is my drug of choice.

Does this make me crazy? Science says no.

2017 research showed that the weather where you grow up shapes your personality. Digging into the study, it only looked at ambient temperature, not "weather" in the broader sense. Specifically, their research set out to determine how temperature impacts personality.

The findings? "All other things being equal, a child growing up in sunny California, for instance, will be more open, agreeable, and even keeled than one growing up in snowy Buffalo."

From personal experience, that tracks.

Other scientists explain how weather, including sun, rain, and temperature, impacts mood and energy.

But wait, why are the world's happiest countries so overrepresented by Northern European nations? The World Happiness Report examined six key variables: GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and perceptions of corruption. And these are categories in which Northern Europe excels.

Other research (via a Vox article) challenges the Happiness Report findings by claiming that the original questions were biased, pushing respondents to think about their happiness not as an isolated state but "by comparing themselves to others — either positively or negatively."

One nugget that struck me from the latter research was the suggestion that it's not per capita GDP that fosters happiness as much as reaffirming that income inequality makes whole countries less happy.

But the Vox article about the latter research felt like it lost the plot. Yes, it established that the questions in the original World Happiness Report were slightly leading. “By showing a picture of a ladder and saying to imagine some people “at the top” and others “at the bottom,” the question may be influencing respondents to consider not so much their actual happiness as their status.”

But by the end of the article, it suggested (but did not come out and say) that the results of the original happiness survey would be similar (rankings by country) to the latter study. In the second study, “people associated well-being more with mental and physical health, relationships, and family. They still thought of money, but rather than thinking in terms of wealth, they thought in terms of financial security."

In essence, all this additional research suggested that those who live in places with lower inequality, where they could work less and live more, places where getting sick doesn’t lead to bankruptcy, where they can send their children to school without fear of mass shootings, and send them to college without remortgaging the house, those folks are happier.

However you measure, the US continues to slide down the happiness scale, and those under 30 face even more grim outlooks.

That's why this area of study fascinates me the most — how a place (both nature and nurture) impacts you. There's a growing field of research into geographical psychology, the "link between location and psychological phenomena, such as how and why personality traits, life satisfaction, and social behavior differ from place to place."

This research focuses on fixed geographical features and considers factors such as a region's societal norms and values. It's this holistic picture that I think about while I consider where to go next. Maybe early sunsets and colder winters wouldn't be so oppressive if I didn't feel trapped in a country where I spend tens of thousands of dollars for basic healthcare and have experienced stagnant wages while CEOs made nearly 200 times what their workers got paid last year. Or maybe it's the increasingly hostile policies towards women and anyone not a straight, white CIS man. Or it might be work culture — years ago, I had a VP contact me consistently over the weekend asking me to prepare reports and/or content for a Sunday night/Monday morning deadline so she could relay it to the CEO during her weekly meeting. When a few others and I stopped responding, she was shocked and didn't understand. I blocked her, and then I quit.

I need the place I call home to have at least a few things I desire in a home, and therefore, I don't think I can live anywhere in the US except in a sunny, urban, blue state. That leaves southern CA. While I love LA, I can't afford to move back without getting a full-time corporate job. NY has all the costs of LA without the sun (but with more walkability). In the end, the sun > walking for me.

On the other hand, I could easily see myself living along the Adriatic or Southern Spain, knowing I'd have to deal with more bureaucratic issues versus remaining in the US, but my quality of life in most other ways would rise significantly without working 50+ hours a week.

If you could relocate anywhere, where would it be and why?