“The only thing we do more in life is sleep,” said Jon Clifton, CEO of the polling organization Gallup. “If we spend that much time at work, if we are truly miserable, it’s making our lives worse.”

The factors that make our lives worse is the subject of Clifton’s new book, “Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It.” In the book, Clifton uses Gallup’s own polling on well-being — which the firm started measuring in 2006 — to look at how many people in the world are unhappy, and why. According to the polling, the number of miserable people has steadily ticked up since Gallup started measuring.

“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke to Clifton about the findings in the book and about running a major polling company when surveys and data make headlines daily. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. To listen, use the media player above.

Jon Clifton: It really comes down to three factors. One of them is the global rise of hunger. The other two big factors are loneliness and the workplace. We spend so much of our lives at work. There’s one analysis that says it’s 115,000 hours — which is 13 years of a person’s life. I tried to replicate the analysis and came up with about 85,000. So the only thing we do more in life is sleep. So if we spend that much time at work, if we are truly miserable at work, it’s making our lives worse.

Kai Ryssdal: So let me turn this a little bit to the “Marketplace” side of this. We have talked about the food crisis on this program, not so much about loneliness, but that clearly is an area that we’ve got to think about the economic impacts of. But let me ask you about the workplace and how people are feeling. I did an interview a number of weeks ago with a young woman named Kyla Scanlon, who does TikTok videos about the macroeconomy. And she has coined this phrase called the “vibecession,” which is to say, the economy is lousy in part because people feel so lousy. Do you agree with that?

Clifton: Well, if you’re talking about specifically in the workplace, I do. But this idea about “quiet quitting” is not new. We find that globally, about 60% of the entire world’s workforce is not engaged. But again, this is a problem that’s existed far before, kind of, the past two years.

Ryssdal: Amen. Let me ask you this. How many people work at Gallup?

Clifton: Twelve hundred globally.

Ryssdal: So do you think 60% of them are unhappy?

Clifton: No, I was actually referring to the global workforce. So we apply our own sciences to our own organization, and our survey suggests that 90% of our colleagues are thriving at work. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean their overall well-being is thriving, but we work really hard at creating a workplace where everybody has the opportunity to do what they do best and where they can ultimately thrive.

Ryssdal: Well, so thank you for that segue to the polling part of the Gallup company. It is, as we said, a busy time for you. Let me frame the question this way: Is it possible we know too much about how Americans and people in the world feel?

Clifton: Absolutely not. We don’t know enough, because the Big Data revolution that took place in rich countries has been totally absent in poor countries. There are 80 countries now in the world that not only don’t have a statistics plan, they don’t even have it fully funded. So basic data on things like births and deaths just aren’t taking place in many poor countries.

Ryssdal: I take that point. And I appreciate the distinction of the global audience because that matters. Let me ask you, though, about polling in the United States. There is a surfeit of data about how we feel, what we’re thinking, what we’re doing, who we like, who we don’t like, who we want to vote for and who we never want to see in office again. Given all of that, do you worry that the insights that polling can give us, which can be substantial, get lost in the noise?

Clifton: Without question, but I wouldn’t blame polling. I would blame the kind of polling. For some reason, in the survey research community, people get really uncomfortable about this kind of survey research, about how people feel, how they feel about political issues. And they fail to realize that a lot of the data that they consume is actually collected exactly the same way. So, for example, unemployment. It’s a household survey of 60,000 people that the government conducts, and they’re basically asking over the course of about an hour, “Do you have a job?” What Gallup does differently is rather than ask, “Do you have a job?” which we do replicate that, but we’re also just asking people, “How do you feel about the economy? How do you feel about your own personal finances?”

Ryssdal: I guess my, my thought on that is more people ought to listen to “Marketplace” because we explain the two surveys that go into unemployment and job gains every single month. But I guess the bigger question, sir, is how do you take the data that you, Gallup, over history has and make leaders pay attention to that when the hurlyburly of political polling distracts everybody?

Clifton: Yeah, that’s fair. Sometimes in the research that we’re doing, we run the risk of boring our readers. It’s true. We did an article recently that said Britons are down on their economy. We know that the U.K. has the highest inflation of all rich countries. Sometimes what we want people to know is that we can confirm conventional wisdom. But other times when we don’t, and we tell them something that is quite surprising, like the global rise of pain, sadness, anger, worry and stress, I hope it means that leaders will pay even more attention because they’ll see an organization that, you know, kind of stuck to telling exactly what the information was.

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