Free and Happy? Dynamics of Subjective Well-being in Lithuania in the Perspective of Generational Change

In response to the increasing attention to quality- of -life issues, the study of happiness has recently become increasingly popular in the world as a separate field of social research. Researchers are addressing such questions as: What determines the fact that people feel happy? Are we happy 'the same way'? What does this reveal about us as a society? Does happiness mean the same things to people of different generations? Does the experience of living in a free society of higher welfare engender generations of happier people?Using data from the European Values Survey (1990, 1999, 2008, 2017), this article ad- dresses the issue of the dynamics of happiness in the Lithuanian society in order to find out how different macro- and micro -level factors line up in the public welfare equation, and how it is related to the generational change of the country's population, paying a spe-cial attention to the specifics of the so -called The First Independence Generation. To achieve the objective of the study, different methods of empirical data analysis are used: descrip-tive statistics, tests of covariance and comparison of means, logistic regression. The anal-ysis revealed significant differences in happiness between different social generations of the Lithuanian population, even after controlling for other factors influencing it.