It seems that no one is ever happy to be just happy; you have to be happier than the next guy or the next country. And some countries just have to be even unhappier because they didn’t make the upper ranks of this year’s World Happiness Report.
Yes, there’s a World Happiness Report, issued annually for the past ten years by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It factors in such variables as income, healthy life expectancy, generosity, freedom, trust and social support. Obviously no subjectivity involved, oh, no.
It probably will come as little surprise that the happiest nations are largely European and North American and all distinctly ‘first world,’ and the nations at the bottom are clustered in poor areas of Africa and Asia.
The Top Ten are Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Israel and New Zealand. The Unhappiest Ten are Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Botswana, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Lebanon and Afghanistan.
Image: Helsinki, Capital of Happiness
