Happiness is a vague, multifaceted, and subjective phenomenon that is difficult to define precisely for measurement and hard to measure in a manner that would allow for meaningful comparisons.
Yet, Wednesday was World Happiness Day and the United Nation’s twelfth annual International Day of Happiness and the day on which the 2024 World Happiness Report was released, the latter a report that ranks countries based on how happy they are.
A global pandemic was declared some 1,474 days ago, and one subject frequently discussed in public and in private was how the first few years of the pandemic affects people’s moods. Are we anxious all the time and sad or, if we are lucky, possibly cheerful and optimistic.
The good news is that global happiness has not taken a hit in those 1,474 days. Life has been “remarkably resilient,” as last year’s report states.
The Nobels Fredssenter, or Nobel Peace Center, located in an old train station from 1872, in Oslo, Norway
What’s new is that the researchers behind the report found that older generations are happier than younger ones. Baby boomers’ happiness increases each year while the opposite is true with the Millennial cohort.
We found some pretty striking results. There is great variety among countries in the relative happiness of the younger, older, and in-between populations. Hence the global happiness rankings are quite different for the young and the old, to an extent that has changed a lot over the last dozen years.”
The report looks at such factors as social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption.
The ranking in the report were derived from a global poll conducted by Gallup each year that included a question known as the Cantril Ladder: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”
But isn’t Disney World the happiest place on earth?
Finland – for the seventh consecutive year – is the world’s happiest nation according to the report. Once again, Nordic nations do especially well in the report. Finland is followed in the rankings by Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden. Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Australia New Zealand, Costa Rica, Kuwait, Austria, and Canada make up the remainder of the top 15.
The next ten are Belgium, Ireland, Czechia (apparently Czechia is happier if we say this as opposed to “the Czech Republic”), Lithuania, United Kingdom, Slovenia, United Arab Emirates, United States, Germany, and Mexico.
New to the top 20 are Costa Rica and Kuwait and gone is the United States.
One reason for that is that happiness has apparently fallen so sharply among young people in North America that young people there are now less happy than the old. Those low scores were critical in pushing the United States out of the top 20 in the overall rankings for the first time since the report was first published in 2012, but it also appears that the reason the United States and certain other countries dropped in rank was because other nations – in particular Czechia and Slovenia – had made great strides in increasing their happiness quotients.
Nonetheless, the difference in the overall rankings between top-ranked Finland at 7.741 and Austria, Nr. 14, at 6.905, and the United States, Nr. 23, at 6.725 is negligible.
Design Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark. People who buy Danish furniture are generally happy.
On the other hand, one of the most striking things in the happiness report every year is that there is always a large and very noticeable gap between the happiness ratings of the top and bottom countries, a full six points (on the 0 to 10 scale) between Finland at the top and Afghanistan at the bottom. The top countries are far more tightly grouped than the bottom ones: The top twenty countries all fall within one point of one another, compared with a 2.5 point spread among the bottom twenty.
Russia, which attacked Ukraine in February 2022, is at Nr. 72, with a rating of 5,785, this year, down from Nr. 70 in 2023 with a ranking of 5.071 although the 2024 rating is an improvement over that of, 2022, when the Northern Neighbor was Nr. 80 with a ranking of 5..459. Ukraine, meanwhile, is further down in the rankings, justifiably unhappy, at Nr. 105, with a rating of 4.873, down from Nr. 92 in 2023 and Nr. 98 in 2022 and rankings of 5,071 and 5,084, respectively.
Before the war, in 2021, Russia was Nr. 68 with a rating of 5.68 and Ukraine was Nr. 90 with a rating of 5.07.
Finally, it’s important to note where people are the the least happy and, unless you’re a happiness missionary, stay away. The report’s editors found that people in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, are the most miserable. Not only is Afghanistan the most miserable country in the world – with a rating of 1.721 – but it has been so since the beginning days of the report a decade ago.
For good measure, rounding out the bottom 20 are, in declining order, Togo, Jordan, India, Egypt, Sri Lanka,Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Comoros, Yemen, Zambia, , Eswatini, Malawi, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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