I made a graph of this and the unemployment rate, they’re correlated at r=0.66 (with one data point for each time Gallup ran the survey, taking the unemployment rate on the closest day for which there’s data). You can see both lines spike with every recession.
It looks like 2008 led to about a 1.3x increase in the number of people who said they were dissatisfied with their life.
I made a graph of this and the unemployment rate, they’re correlated at r=0.66 (with one data point for each time Gallup ran the survey, taking the unemployment rate on the closest day for which there’s data). You can see both lines spike with every recession.