My feeling is that it’s mainly what delphica said. The city attracts ambitious people and by definition ambitious people are dissatisfied with their current circumstances.
An aggravating factor could be, not just the winter weather and not just the small living spaces, but the combination of the two. On a freezing night are you going to brave the streets or are you going to hole up in your little hovel?
They are liberals: hateful, mean-spirited, intolerant people.
There is nothing more vital than instilling low expectations in our young people.
This sounds like a huge pain in the ass to me. I’m just too laid back to have to scramble for transportation.
As the Mayor Lenny in Ghost Busters says “Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker’s God-given right.” 
I have lived in NYC for a year, and it sucked. Granted, I was a kid, and I lived in one of the shittier places (Flushing), but it does seem worse than other big cities. Chicago, Montreal, DC, Toronto, are all just as big and cold and crowded but everyone seems happier in those cities and the place is noticeably cleaner, too. San Francisco is not cold but seems pretty crowded and big too. I am only talking about the tourist areas and the subways - it seems like NYC can’t even get its shit together enough to have Times Square relatively clean and nice. I never wanted to live in a big city before but my experiences were limited to Detroit (blah) and NYC. Now that I have seen others I think I might not mind so much.
I don’t know, NYC just sucks. I would never want to live there. And I am an upstater and love visiting.
Bingo.
It’s been known for awhile that living in an urban environment is linked to a dramatic increase in emotional and mental disorders. Schizophrenia, anxiety attacks, depression, substance abuse – not pretty. It’s too bad the city is otherwise such a helpful invention. They’re engines of economic activity, intellectual development, and it’s more efficient than rural/sub-urban living, but the constant stress and alienation fucks our brains up. I wonder how much of this is related to the Dunbar number.
Constant super-villain attacks.
Just an anecdote but by far the unhappiest person I know really, really wants to move to NYC. He’s the kind of guy that somewhat romanticizes heroin and booze-addicted authors writing about the grim squalor of their daily lives. Do say hello when you meet him kvetching miserably about people talking loud enough to hear their conversations in a restaurant or pretty young women wearing skimpy clothes in public just to torture his libido :D.
I haven’t lived in NYC, or even visited it much, but I have a hypothesis about the dissatisfaction/unhappiness.
You get a lot of young kids moving to NYC because it’s “where the action is”, and “the big city”. A lot of them probably end up being pretty disillusioned by it- bad weather, crowding, the aforementioned daily hassles, the lower bang-for-your-buck, etc… and no small percentage of them probably don’t see their grand plans to be in fashion/acting/whatever in NYC pan out either, so they’re basically dealing with all this shit, and not making as much money as they’d like, doing the jobs they wanted to do. Sounds like a recipe for unhappiness.
A good chunk of these people go home, but for the ones who won’t or can’t, they’re kind of having all the fun of seeing others actually pull off whatever it was that they couldn’t. Plus, they have kids, etc… and are stuck in the city and don’t have yards, etc… same bullshit as before, but now it’s really a pain at that stage of life.
Then you have a contingent of relatively broke locals who have to deal with the same daily bullshit, and also have to deal with low income and being minorities for the most part. Unhappiness again.
Finally, I get the impression that you have more visible income inequality there- you are likely see celebrities, heads of state, royalty, etc… more often than in say… Oklahoma City, and the local contingent of rich folks is probably pretty visible as well, with the city being so small.
So I
If I were in NYC for any length of time, the population density would get to me. We live in the country without any close neighbors, but if I had a multimillion dollar lottery win, I’d buy the two nearby homes and raze them.
Eh, these studies don’t really measure happiness, they measure whether people say they’re happy or not. I think there’s a lot of cultural difference in the degree to which people are willing to say they’re happy or unhappy, and that this usually doesn’t have much correlation to their actual happiness.
Basically, New Yorkers are a lot more willing to complain to strangers (and thus, poll-takers) than people in Louisiana.
Because the culture there is unusually stressful even for a very large city? That it has one of the highest costs of living in the world? That the weather sucks at almost all times of year?
None of this is debatable. There is nothing relaxing about NYC, that’s not what people do there.
By the way, to whomever posted about SF, San Francisco may be densely populated but large, it ain’t. It’s only something like 825 thousand.
1- We have the world’s best museums
2- You can get Fallafel or a hot dog at 4AM, where else can you do that?
3- You can walk down the street and hear 5 different languages being spoken
4- You have restaurants from literally, every country in the world
5- You can get pretty much anywhere on a bicycle, even when it snows
6- Any/all clubs or hobbies are represented, Italian Cooking, French Poetry, Capoeira, building model cars… etc
7- A city full of intelligent, opinionated people
8- Great sports franchises
9- Tons of independent cinema theaters
10- A city that is vibrant and alive, teeming with humanity
Yeah man… for that kind of dough you should be able to buy a place with a FULLY obstructed view of Bayonne.
xoxo, a Native New Yorker (who now lives in NJ)
The vast ethnic diversity of NYC is likely a factor, as diversity erodes social trust, altruism, civic-mindedness, and promotes social isolation.
“In the presence of diversity, we hunker down. We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.” - Robert D. Putnam
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x/full
So all this is why New Yorkers have a reputation for being unhappy, per the thread title? 
The study leaned on a questionnaire that has been administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the last several years and asks respondents: “In general, how satisfied are you with your life?”
The study ranked those self-reported answers and adjusted them for income, housing prices, age and other factors that might influence how happy a place could be. :dubious::dubious::dubious:
Because they die out of water.
Many New Yorkers were not born there. Happy people stay where they are, because they are happy there. Unhappy people move.
I think a more revealing question would be about satisfaction. Having a life you find enjoyable and having a life you find meaningful and fulfilling are not the same thing.
[quote=“even_sven, post:39, topic:703947”]
Many New Yorkers were not born there. Happy people stay where they are, because they are happy there. Unhappy people move.
Having been born, raised and spent a great deal of my life in NYC, I now hate it…why? There are no more New Yorkers! The city is a tourist paradise for shopping in overpriced chain stores…most of the interesting people have been priced out. Most of the funky, crappy little owner owned specialty shops have been replaced by H & M or Zara …the rents are out of control and the boroughs are not far behind… Williamsburg, seriously? Bushwick? We used to be scared to go there! My fourth floor walk up dingy tenement apartment with railroad rooms and paper thin walls was $3,200…in Brooklyn, no less. I moved to the suburbs because I didn’t have half a million dollars laying around to purchase a studio apartment. Mini-rant…I miss my city, but so many other places are far more interesting now. Oh, and the weather? Aside from six days in the fall and spring? Miserable.