Everything is expensive, our president is the dumbest person to ever live, we're constantly at threat of random shootings, and did I mention everything is expensive?
I've heard a lot of worries from friends, especially friends with kids, I had never heard before. Mostly gun violence and the loss of women's rights, which some friends have voiced as restricting their options in where they will work and live that they never had before. That, and the new anxiety about bringing your phone on a plane, which I share.
Aren't the Nordic countries listed at the top also the highest consumers of anti-depressants? I only know this because having travelled to the Copenhagen airport many times with Danish colleagues, one of them mentioned it when we saw the inevitable "Welcome to the happiest country on Earth" posters.
The article has a paywall for me and I was curious about their methodology. Fortunately, Wikipedia has some information:
"Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale."
Huh... Finland is #1 in happiness but has the third highest suicide rate in Western Europe (behind Belgium, France, and Switzerland) [1]. Belgium is medium happy, but has the 15th highest suicide rate in the world, substantially above the US. The UK is second lowest happiness, but has one of the lowest suicide rates in Europe. The difference in happiness between Finland and the US appears huge, yet their suicide rates are similar (Finland is next after the US of the countries on the happiness list)
What a disappointing comment on HN. Did you check who published it, what the methodology used was, before commenting?
Of course not. Easier to be snarkier than to research and understand.
For the record: The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
> The Gallup World Poll, which remains the principal source of data in this report, asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the
worst possible as a 0. Each respondent provides a numerical response on this scale, referred to as the Cantril Ladder. Typically, around 1,000 responses are gathered annually for each country. Weights are used to construct population-representative national averages for each year in each country.
We base our happiness ranking on a three year average of these life evaluations since the larger sample size enables more precise estimates
Thank god the Netherlands is only #5. It’s high, but not too high. That said, the Finns probably got surveyed right after exiting the sauna. Is that fair?
We have been under attack for years and it is definitely working. Hell, at this point it’s not off the table that our democracy itself will fall to this attack. I’d be incredibly impressed by the effectiveness, if it were not so frankly depressing.
Our president won't condemn violence and Politicians on the right all fan the flames while holding everyone to higher standards than the president himself when it comes to violent rhetoric.
Gun violence regardless of position is still always in the news, and the party in power has no intention of doing anything about it.
The political elite actively shun science.
Tech billionaires are all licking the boot - so the hopes some had that those with money and large corporate entities would keep the government in check are long gone.
Politicians actively endanger our international relationships with the entire world. Everybody in the world looks at us like a laughing stock.
The elite actively welcome and cheer for AI taking peoples jobs.
The economy is shit meanwhile our leaders lie to our faces about how tariffs and their own economic policies work and pointing at wall street gains meanwhile the majority of Americans don't invest in the first place.
Our rights are being stripped. Military/National Guard is actively deployed in the streets in places, and there is threat of deployment in other places (hint left leaning places). Any speech not aligned with the presidents values is criticized and threatened at a national scale.
Politics is just a reality TV show made for clicks and our current leaders are basically the equivalent if children bickering. "Transparency" is completely gone - they ran on transparency and then immediately flipped, who coulda seen that coming.
There is literally nothing to be happy about here unless you're already rich.
Some years ago I moved back to Finland (#1) after several years in the US (now at #24).
While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question. Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
Americans are primed to want it all and seem to constantly compare themselves against unachievable standards on social media. “The American Dream” is more illusionary than ever. Everybody is a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire. This can be positive when it produces a drive that builds things, but it seems to mostly produce unhappiness right now because it’s so out of balance.
What was it that happened between 2023 and 2024? Here's all i can think of but none of these really explain it:
* Major terrorist attack in israel; its obvious we care way too much about this random country on the other side of the planet but even so i can't see that impacting people's happiness this hard.
* general populace now knows LLMs exist and may someday potentially perform jobs which were previously thought to be immune to automation but i would expect this to be offset by the people amazed by this technology.
* It's becoming increasingly apparent that our then-current president might actually suffer from a more serious case of Alzheimer's than reagan did; simultaneously it is becoming increasingly apparent that the only viable alternative is going to be trump again.
#3 is the only one that sort-of makes sense but I have doubts that people are this invested in presidential circuses on a personal level.
I believe that these self-reported surveys are partly testing the cultural acceptability of complaining—that is, the more unacceptable it is to complain, the happier one comes out in the scoring. How well that corresponds to 'actual' happiness is, of course, a different question.
I base this on experience with some of the 'happy' cultures on the list. However, I would be interested in knowing whether HN members from Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands (to name the top 5) agree with this concept or not.
41 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 57.9 ms ] threadMany US states are larger than multiple EU countries combined.
"Nationally representative samples of respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report
Suicide rates aren't everything, but they are certainly telling a very different story. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
Of course not. Easier to be snarkier than to research and understand.
For the record: The World Happiness Report is published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and an independent editorial board.
https://www.worldhappiness.report/
I did, in fact. Did you?
Gun violence regardless of position is still always in the news, and the party in power has no intention of doing anything about it.
The political elite actively shun science.
Tech billionaires are all licking the boot - so the hopes some had that those with money and large corporate entities would keep the government in check are long gone.
Politicians actively endanger our international relationships with the entire world. Everybody in the world looks at us like a laughing stock.
The elite actively welcome and cheer for AI taking peoples jobs.
The economy is shit meanwhile our leaders lie to our faces about how tariffs and their own economic policies work and pointing at wall street gains meanwhile the majority of Americans don't invest in the first place.
Our rights are being stripped. Military/National Guard is actively deployed in the streets in places, and there is threat of deployment in other places (hint left leaning places). Any speech not aligned with the presidents values is criticized and threatened at a national scale.
Politics is just a reality TV show made for clicks and our current leaders are basically the equivalent if children bickering. "Transparency" is completely gone - they ran on transparency and then immediately flipped, who coulda seen that coming.
There is literally nothing to be happy about here unless you're already rich.
What happened to the narco-state situation, murder by the thousands, etc? It's all gone already?
While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question. Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.
Americans are primed to want it all and seem to constantly compare themselves against unachievable standards on social media. “The American Dream” is more illusionary than ever. Everybody is a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire. This can be positive when it produces a drive that builds things, but it seems to mostly produce unhappiness right now because it’s so out of balance.
* Major terrorist attack in israel; its obvious we care way too much about this random country on the other side of the planet but even so i can't see that impacting people's happiness this hard.
* general populace now knows LLMs exist and may someday potentially perform jobs which were previously thought to be immune to automation but i would expect this to be offset by the people amazed by this technology.
* It's becoming increasingly apparent that our then-current president might actually suffer from a more serious case of Alzheimer's than reagan did; simultaneously it is becoming increasingly apparent that the only viable alternative is going to be trump again.
#3 is the only one that sort-of makes sense but I have doubts that people are this invested in presidential circuses on a personal level.
I base this on experience with some of the 'happy' cultures on the list. However, I would be interested in knowing whether HN members from Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and the Netherlands (to name the top 5) agree with this concept or not.
Actions speak louder.