By Irudayam, CC license
In the 2023 World Happiness Report, a wonderful trend has emerged from the data.
Despite a major war in Europe, and all the government shutdowns and totalitarian policing measures in front of the largest pandemic in 100 years, happiness ratings have remained much the same across Europe and elsewhere.
The report, which is a publication of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, uses the Gallop World Poll data from 150 nations looking at things like a sense of social support and positive feelings toward others to rank order countries on reported happiness.
GDP, medical facilities, and freedom to make life choices are then compared with the perception of government corruption, and sense of dystopia as factors to try and get a sense of why people in certain countries rank their happiness higher than others, though these socio-economic indicators do not contribute to overall score.
CNN reports that an average from 2020 to 2022 shows that scores have remained concretely high in Europe.
“Even during these difficult years, positive emotions have remained twice as prevalent as negative ones, and feelings of positive social support twice as strong as those of loneliness,” John Helliwell, one of the report’s authors, said in a news release.
Visit Finland – Asko Kuittinen
“Benevolence to others, especially the helping of strangers, which went up dramatically in 2021, stayed high in 2022.”
For the 6th year in a row, Finland occupies the top spot on the index, while Denmark retains its position in 2nd. Israel moved up the most, from 9th position in 2022 to 4th in 2023.
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Neither Russia nor Ukraine dropped in the report. Helliwell suggested that now that the pandemic is well and truly behind us, it could spur a general rise in happiness as people re-evaluate that to which they are returning, and a closer look at what it is they want out of life.
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