WA state is both rich and miserable, study finds. Coincidence?

Let's say you're a regular working stiff in Seattle, and you get enthused with the civic spirit to be part of next week's once in a lifetime experience, the FIFA World Cup.

You log on and find that the U.S. versus Australia game in Seattle is $188.

Whoops, that's just the cost of parking next to the stadium.

The cheapest ticket to actually get inside that game, on the FIFA resale market Tuesday, was $1,035. The most expensive: $23,000! Other games are cheaper, such as the first one between Belgium and Egypt, where a solo nosebleed ticket was going for $310.

How would all this make you feel? Left out, perhaps. But maybe also: Left behind.

This is an anecdotal example, I think, of what's animating a new national survey of the well-being of the states. It's called the State of the Nation Project, a series of rankings created by economic and social science researchers to get at the broadest possible question: How are we doing, really?

Washington state overall is doing … OK. We rank 20th out of 51 states plus D.C. across 31 measures of health, wealth, education and happiness. Minnesota is No. 1.

But in the specifics, Washington is anything but average. We're a study of extremes, and in a distinctly American way.

The good news is that Washington ranks No. 1 in the nation in economic productivity" – meaning we crank out more gross domestic product per hour worked than anyplace else.

We also punch above our weight in total size of our economy. These two indicate that Washington is among the nation's top places for material prosperity and growing wealth.

It means there's plenty of people around here who can drop a grand or two, or even 23, on a soccer game.

But what's jarring about the study – and why I'm highlighting it – is that all this wealth, money and business activity isn't making us happy. Quite the opposite.

"The nation's founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence about 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,'" the study says. "So, it is worth asking: Are we actually happy or satisfied with our lives? We might have good jobs and incomes, but does that material prosperity actually make us feel better off?

"Washington's progress in this area has been negative," it concludes about us. "Satisfaction with our current lives is worsening over time."

In life contentment, Washington ranks 28th among the states, with the share of adults reporting they are "very happy with their life" declining by nearly half in the past 20 years. On youth depression we are 36th worst. On adult anxiety and mental health, we are 47th worst. Combining various categories, Washington is among the lowest states right now for what the study calls "personal well-being."

How can we be so prosperous yet so dissatisfied? It's a cliché that money can't buy love or happiness. But does it make us miserable as well?

"This is perhaps the most counterintuitive finding," the study authors conclude. "The general decline in self-reported well-being is happening even as incomes continue to rise. … The implication is both sobering and actionable: economic growth is not enough."

Why, though? The authors admit they don't know. Their review is a sort of societal temperature check, but it did not investigate underlying causes.

One of the sociologists speculated that American culture and policy is focused on GDP above all else, so that's what we tend to get.

"The United States for some time now prioritized economic growth at any cost," he told The New York Times last year.

"We're so wealthy but so unhappy," added another researcher. "It seems like the central question of modernity.

Washington state has become a ground zero for this, according to this analysis. The only state with a wider gap between its soaring economic prosperity and relatively low sense of human well-being is California.

Washington also ranks relatively high in areas of health, education and the environment. Our problems seem to be more internal and intangible, namely in how people here view themselves, their lives and the world.

Something's just off, the study suggests.

My theory is laid out in the anecdote about soccer tickets. Economic prosperity here isn't broadly shared. So a share of Washington residents may feel like they're constantly falling behind, or already out of the race entirely.

Thousand-dollar tickets are a luxury item. But I hear from young people all the time that the cost of just going out for a drink or a bite to eat in Seattle can make standard socializing into a lux expense. The economic froth creates a counter social pall.

Stories about how wealthy Seattleites are now so rich they're building condos for their cars probably only aggravate this feeling.

I mentioned above that Minnesota has the highest well-being overall of any state. They rank better than us in most categories – their income inequality and poverty are both lower, while their life satisfaction and societal happiness are higher. The one place we decisively beat them? Economic output. On that we are stars and Minnesota is just average.

Somewhere along the line our state got both rich and miserable.

It's probably not the rich themselves who are miserable. How low can you be with a condo for your car? But it also doesn't seem like a total coincidence that the two phenomena go hand in hand.

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