Living well

Since President Obama took office in January 2009, more Americans are evaluating their own lives well enough to be considered “thriving,” according to a survey conducted by Gallup and Healthways. In fact, 55.4 percent of the 105,000 people interviewed in the first seven months of this year met that qualification, the highest in the survey’s nine-year history. The pollster classifies respondents as “thriving,” “struggling” or “suffering” based on how they rate their current and future lives on a scale of 0 to 10; they’re considered to be thriving if they report a 7 or higher, or expect their life to be an 8 or higher in five years. In 2008, President George W. Bush’s last year in office, 48.9 percent of Americans were classified as thriving.