Increasingly unhappy Hongkongers need to take a reality check

Hongkongers are a miserable lot, according to the 2014 Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Based on a survey of about 146,000 people aged over 15, it ranked Hong Kong 120th among 145 countries and territories, far behind Taiwan (59th), Japan (92nd) and Singapore (97th).

That Hong Kong people seem to be getting less happy by the year is not exactly news. The UN-based World Happiness Report listed the city at 72nd last year among 158 countries and territories, down from 64th in 2013 and 46th in 2012.

But do we really need these reports and indexes to remind ourselves that not only have we not arrived at the state of happiness, we may not even be travelling in that direction? When was the last time you saw a smiling face on the MTR, or read news about the city without coming across something that made you say to yourself: "What have I done to deserve this?"

You can round up the usual suspects and blame the widening gap between rich and poor, the increasingly unaffordable property prices, the incessant political infighting, the lack of social mobility and the death of romance and idealism in a city that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. But the toil and sorrow of Hongkongers have a deeper, more fundamental source. It goes to the heart of what sets the city apart and lifts it out of the ordinary.

For years, Hong Kong has been the emblem not only of freedom of choice but also the power to choose. Its prosperity is founded on the extraordinary lengths it goes to to provide consumers with multifarious choices in the market.

This has not been lost on the world's influential economists and opinion leaders. In his bestselling Free to Choose, Milton Friedman extols Hong Kong as the bastion of economic freedom whose foundations, the Nobel laureate believes, are personal choice, voluntary exchange and open markets.