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If the misery of your daily life has you wanting to eat a bullet rather than face the reality of another day, you may want to consider moving — Phoenix has been ranked the most miserable city in the entire country.
According to a Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal “misery index,” Phoenix’s changes in unemployment rates, high gas prices, and decreasing home values is making Phoenicians more miserable than residents of any other large metropolitan area.
The average gas price in Phoenix these days is about $3.53 per gallon, the unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, and the average home price is on the verge of dipping below $100,000. So from a financial standpoint, things suck.
However, some of the other cities on the list that rank higher than Phoenix are just finishing up digging themselves out of the snowy, cold, gray abyss known throughout the majority of the country as “winter.” Meanwhile, we spent the last five months playing golf and soaking up the sunshine — in other words, we’ll take the high gas prices in exchange for not having to wear six layers of clothing just to walk from the house to the car.
According to the index, Boston is the least miserable of all large U.S. cities, followed by Cleveland, New York, and Detroit.
Detroit! Have the pollsters ever been there?
Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and Phoenix take the bottom four spots on the index.
See the WSJ’s complete “misery index” here.
