World's Happiest Countries

I've never been to Finland, and I don't believe I've met anyone from there, but I'm always surprised when they're ranked number one because of reading comments on this forum when comparisons are made of differences in citizens. For example, I've read comments such as Fins don't like small talk and try to keep their personal space. As a person who leans toward the introverted side of the scale I should know better than to think that is a reason to think it is a sign of unhappiness. I googled a couple of articles about it and both came up with similar answers as to why there is joy in Finland. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/05/what-people-in-finland-happiest-country-in-world-never-do-according-to-psychologist.html#:~:text=According%20to%20a%202021%20survey,and%20immerse%20ourselves%20in%20nature.

These lists are completely dependent on the criteria they select to base their analysis on. Sometimes these criteria are reasonable, most of the time they aren't. They're merely selected to produce a narrative.

Anytime I'm interested in one of these lists, I look further to see what criteria they used - then I'm sorry I wasted my time considering them at all. Maybe I missed the link to the study in the CNN article?

This isn't a knock on Finland or any other country that scored high. It's a knock on what passes for research today.

Travel Boss,
I completely agree with you. I have visited 81 foreign countries and while I find the list provided has some merit, it should be viewed as the product of the someone's criteria.

Yes, I have been to all the Nordic countries except Finland and found the people seem happy and very nice.

Having just come from two recent trips to Africa, one to Egypt and the other on Safari to Kenya/Tanzania, I felt that the people in those countries were happy, despite the obvious poverty there. Yes, Egypt involved dealing with many pushy street sellers that could be very aggressive, but all in all the people seemed happy.

Perhaps culture is a huge factor. We found Russians to be generally standoffish in public. Some of our tour group perceived that the people just weren't that friendly, but I had read that Russians tend to be that way in public with people they don't know. They think Americans are strange because we are always smiling and happy. Russians are very warm people, once you get to know them and as friends, they are super.

There's a great book called The Almost Nearly Perfect People by British travel journalist Michael Booth that unpacks just this subject. The book is generally about the complexities of Scandinavian cultures against their simplified public-facing virtues. Booth is an Englishman but married too a Dane and has lived in Denmark for quite a long time.

A few things about happiness surveys are extremely difficult to control. How do people in a given culture tend to understand happiness? How do people in a given culture tend to respond to questions about happiness?

Booth's major hedge about how Scandinavians and some other Europeans perceive happiness is something like "content because things are taken care of." It's not necessarily feeling good in a way that makes you smile, as many cultures perceive happiness. It's not necessarily feeling actualized and achieving goals as other cultures see it.

And then philosophical stoicism is more ingrained in Nordic cultures than most others, and as such they tend to be less apt to complain, even when reporting on happiness survey

Note also that Finland has the fifth highest suicide rate in the world, right up there with a bunch of countries that score quite low on happiness index surveys.

So anyway I tend to take the happiness index results with a grain of salt. Which is not to say that I do not admire Nordic people and how they have built some of the better functioning societies on the planet.

Travel Boss is spot on! Polls are like statistics; one can prove or disprove almost anything depending on the criteria used. They should, in my opinion, be taken with a grain (if not more) of salt.

They think Americans are strange because we are always smiling and happy.

Outward/superficial cheeriness and happiness are two different things

As one of the hedgers above, let me throw a counter-hedge into the pool.

Just because there is some looseness in poll questions, and just because there is some variance in how groups of people will tend to report on them, doesn't mean the evidence the poll produces is useless, and doesn't mean the conclusions that the poll suggests are necessarily wrong. If one drills down hard enough into the slippages of language just about any survey can be called into question. That doesn't mean that it's all nonsense!

So grain of salt yes, baby and bath water not so much :)

Scanners (to borrow the snowboarder slang for Scandinavians) on the whole seem to objectively be doing really very well; as such wouldn't at all surprise me if they are on average happier, whatever that might be, than most other people ....