Are you well rested? Are you treated with respect throughout the day? Do you laugh and smile a lot? Have you learned or done something interesting recently? Are you happy most of the time?

At the end of 2012 Gallup, Inc., published the results of a survey ranking the self-reported happiness of the populations of 148 nations.

Gallup’s poll asked 1,000 people 15 years of age and older in each of the 148 countries five simple questions. Eight of the top 10 nations in terms of “positive emotions” turned out to be in Latin America. Some 85% of respondents in Panama and Paraguay, which ranked first and second in the survey, answered yes to the questions above. In comparison, the figure for Taiwan was 75%, slightly below the 76% of both the US and mainland China. Around the rest of Asia, the numbers ranged from 72% in Japan, 69% in Hong Kong, and 63% in South Korea to just 46% in Singapore, the least happy country in the world.

Gallup suggested that leaders who focused exclusively on traditional economic indicators would be surprised by the lack of correlation between happiness and wealth. After all, Panama’s per-capita GDP is 90th in the world, while Singapore’s is 5th.

On the other hand, the results of the survey would likely have been much the same if you’d asked the opposite questions because such simply phrased queries can skew results by encouraging affirmative responses.

Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that data released by the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Academia Sinica in November 2012 showed that Taiwan’s rates of anxiety and depression have been rising, and our mental health worsening, for the last 20 years. And an online survey by the John Tung Foundation similarly showed that one in five Taiwanese experience greater levels of depressed feelings and require professional help.

Poor circumstances can certainly lead to worry and anxiety, but happiness itself is subjective. With that in mind, many people in Taiwan are rewriting their personal definitions of success.

For decades, virtually all young rural Taiwanese dreamed of moving to the big city to achieve success. But with more and more city dwellers feeling a yearning to return to their hometowns, that’s begun to change. Now that the high speed rail system links Taiwan’s north and south, our rural communities feel much less remote. This is encouraging many people to move back to the countryside in an attempt to ground their lives and explore their love of the land. Such individuals are growing organic produce on previously idle agricultural land, managing communities, writing about their hometowns, or undertaking design work. While they may not earn as much money as they used to, they are leading more spiritually fulfilling lives.

Their approach to self-fulfillment is certainly worth considering in a contemporary world devoted to the reduction of labor costs. UK economist E.F. Schumacher addressed the issue nearly 30 years ago in his prescient Small Is Beautiful. In the book, he pointed out that prosperous nations such as Switzerland and Germany tended to be relatively small, whereas the world’s larger nations tended both to be quite poor and to worship the idea that “bigger is better.” He used this to argue for the beauty of the small, and to suggest that the pursuit of efficiency and productive capacity were inherently limited.

This month’s articles on Chi Po-lin’s aerial photographs documenting changes to Taiwan’s landscape, and on housing policies targeting young people, both echo the yearning so many are feeling for home and stability. As we bid farewell to the turmoil of 2012, let us greet the New Year by embracing people’s desire to return to the countryside, with the hope that Taiwanese society will find strength in their renewed connection to the land.