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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

"Satisfaction with personal life" will have very different implications for different people to the point of being useless. I feel underpaid and am unspeakably sad about the ways in which my society is declining, but I would answer "yes, extremely" if somebody asked if I was satisfied with my "personal" life. I think there are other people in my exact same position and with my exact same level of happiness who would answer differently if asked this specific question.

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> "Satisfaction with personal life" will have very different implications for different people to the point of being useless.

Of course "satisfaction with personal life", like many things in survey, can have very different implications for different people. But it does not necessarily make it being useless.

You could ask more questions about people specific satisfactions with personal life, it does not make the general sense of satisfaction with personal life useless.

I'm not saying the problem is that people are made satisfied by different things. I'm saying that I don't believe the concept of "general satisfaction with personal life" is a useful or meaningful concept because of the English language - because of the different interpretations of what it means. For a counter-example, I think people have a much more consistent feeling of what it means to be "happy" in general.

With student debt levels approaching the astronomical, and default rates escalating proportionately, I think we generally just have our heads in the sand about how absolutely wrecked we're about to become later on. So "sure, or course everything is great"... for now.

You're paying attention to outliers. Most people don't have astronomical student debts, and most that due are in general in extremely high paying professions. Student debt is a problem, but most people do no have 100k in debt for creative writing, etc.

The easy solution is to limit government student loans to 20k and be done with it.

There is roughly 1.6 trillion dollars in student loan debt owed. 40% ($640 billion) of that will be defaulted on. There won't be any large derivatives markets set up to eat it like there were with the mortgage lending crisis. The people who will end up footing the bill for this won't be insured banks, it'll be John Q Taxpayer, and the economy writ-large. Even limiting to $20k per person won't solve this issue.

But do we have a better estimate for things like happiness? Than questionnaires?

Perhaps not, but if the goal is to measure happiness, then in my opinion this specific questionnaire does not do that. I'm sure there are questionnaires with that goal that consist of more relevant and well-thought-out questions.

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