Over nine years, Bulgaria lived through a pandemic, inflationary peak, war on its border, energy crisis and euro changeover. The national Fulfilling Life Index? Statistically indistinguishable from a flat line.
A new longitudinal study by Dr Rossen Koutelov (N ≈ 4,900 respondents, five nationally representative waves, 2017–2026) shows that this apparent stability is not psychologically guaranteed but compositionally produced: psychographic profiles reshuffle beneath the surface while the aggregate indicator stays quiet. The paper introduces “aggregation masking” as a population-level mechanism and combines the PsychoProfiling™ frozen deterministic classifier with a Kitagawa-style compositional decomposition — an approach transferable beyond wellbeing measurement.
The preprint is available on SSRN First Look and is currently under review at an international academic journal.