A swim in the cool waters of a lake during the hot summer months, berry-picking and mushroom foraging in the forests and a sauna with friends and family every saturday. Is it any wonder that Finland is, for the sixth year in a row, the happiest country in the world? According to the World Happiness Report 2023, published by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, few people on the planet are as happy as the Scandinavians, with Denmark at number two and Iceland in the third spot. The ranking uses six key factors to measure happiness — social support, income, health, freedom, generosity, and absence of corruption. The other two nations of the region, Sweden and Norway, are at six and seven, respectively.
But how, then, to explain the fact that the happiest countries in the world are also among the highest consumers of antidepressants? As per the data released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the use of antidepressants increased nearly two and half times across Europe between 2000 and 2020, with Iceland in the top spot, followed immediately by Sweden and Norway, with Finland and Denmark coming in at number eight and nine. This paradox has of late become the focal point of the criticism directed at studies of happiness, with people from around the world, including Finns themselves, pointing out that the measures used often don’t account for such things as loneliness in highly-developed societies and the fact that material well-being does not preclude conditions like clinical depression.
The debate over this year’s rankings — India is ranked low at 125 out of 136 nations — highlights what might actually be a fundamental flaw in the common understanding of such reports. What they really rank is how well each nation has created the conditions for happiness among its citizens. Because happiness itself is too ineffable, individual and elusive to be contained within such prosaic things as rankings and measurements.
