A lot of people (including us!) love many aspects of living in Jakarta. But we don’t think anybody has ever said that living in the Indonesian capital was easy. From its infamously nightmarish traffic and flooding to its lack of public transportation, public services and green spaces, being a citizen of the Big Durian can be… challenging, to say the least.
Another, more accurate way to put it is that living in Jakarta can be stressful as hell. A recent global study, commissioned by British firm Zipjet, attempted to quantify just how stressful (or unstressful) life is in various major cities throughout the world, and we can’t say we’re surprised to find that Jakarta ranked near the bottom as the 19th most anxiety-inducing metropolitan on the index.
Obviously, people are stressed out by a huge variety of factors, so The 2017 Global Least & Most Stressful Cities Ranking graded the 150 major cities in its study based on a wide-spectrum of stress-measurement metrics, including traffic, air pollution, noise pollution, population density, public transportation, unemployment and even factors like mental health and gender equality.
Data for all 150 cities was then compared to give each a weighted score of 1-10 (with 1 indicating least stressful and 10 being most stressful) in each individual category as well as an overall score.
With a score of 7.84, Jakarta was ranked #132 out of the 150. By comparison, Dhaka, Bangladesh, received the ignoble award for most stressful city with a score of 10 while Stuttgart, Germany, was ranked the most chill city in the index with a score of 1.
At least we have plenty of other Asian cities to keep us company near the bottom of the list:
Jakarta scored particularly bad in terms of population density, public health, green spaces, public transportation and traffic (no surprises there) with score over 9 in all those categories.
There are definitely some oddities in the index’s data. For example, Jakarta scored very low in the light pollution category with a score of just 1.18, which seems extremely unlikely given how close Jakarta feels to the sun on many given days. But its low score in that category kept the Indonesian capital from being ranked even worse, so we won’t complain too much.
We were already stressed out by the latest Safe Cities Index by the Economist Intelligence Unit that ranked Jakarta as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and now this! Well, we should probably spend more time analyzing the validity of this study, or pondering ways to make life in Jakarta less stressful, but actually we think we’re just going to go jet off to Bali for a relaxing weekend instead. (What? There’s a volcano there that could erupt any moment? Shut up.)
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