What the Happiest Country Tells Us about Our Society | World Happiness Report 2022

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and it is early morning here in Las Vegas, before 8 AM, and I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted because I got up at 3:00 AM to do a series of interviews with Radio 1 CBC in Canada. They had me at 8 different cities, all the early morning shows, and six o’clock in the east was three o’clock my time. So, I was up plenty early, but it was fun. I was doing interviews about the very recently released World Happiness Report which just issued its 2022 report. There’s some interesting findings from it, and for those who are keeping score and the competition is important, Canada dropped one rank from 14th to 15th. The United States increased its rank from 19th to 16th. In and of themselves, not all that interesting, but there’s some bigger trends that I think we should talk about and say, what is the state of the world with respect to happiness right now? And that’s what this particular video is all about, so stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Yeah, so the World Happiness Report for 2022 is out and it’s very interesting. Certainly, the competitive nature of people comparing their country to others, and the little changes one year to the next, are kind of interesting but sort of unimportant. The statistical difference between 14th and 15th or first and second is generally quite small, and also within the margins of error, often for the nature of the surveying they’re doing. So, don’t look too much at whether Canada dropped from 14th to 15th year over year but look more at the trends over time, which I think is interesting. There are some important findings there and they’re not necessarily very happy ones.

The long-term trend is kind of flat happiness. People are not growing any more satisfied with the quality of their lives across the world and including western industrialized nations. Sorry, that’s true. And in addition, and not surprising to you, while the happiness levels are flat or generally declining a little bit downward, the stress levels are going up across the world. People are more and more stressed, and it’s not just pandemic-related, although that gave certain increased bumps in the level of stress that people are reporting. But the trend since they started doing this World Happiness Report more than 10 years ago is towards increased stress. Generally kind of discouraging for sure. There were some positive signs on the horizon, and in particular with respect to the pandemic and how people responded. Measures of benevolence went up. People are treating strangers more kindly. They’re giving more donations to charities, and they’re volunteering more. So, those kinds of things are an encouraging sign that we responded to catastrophically difficult times with a once in a generation pandemic, and people, a lot of us, 25% increase in benevolence, a lot of people respond very well. So there’s some bright lights in an otherwise discouraging trend line in the report.

And you know, when you look at the countries that have consistently stayed at the very top, mostly Nordic countries, you know, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and a few other western European countries and New Zealand, the ones that are generally at the very top and the ones at the very top, Finland for example, five years in the very top place. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are always very, very high in the rankings. If we look at those countries and say, what is it that they’re doing that stands out relative to other countries? And there’s maybe two observations. The first one we can do very little about. The first one is maybe that there’s a lot of, I would call it, natural national coherence in their populations. I lived in Sweden for a year and I saw it there up close and personal, but studies also show this idea that the country tends to bind itself together. There’s a sense of community, we’re in it together, nature to these kind of homogeneous cultures that have been consistent for many, many hundreds of years. And so, that gives them this little sense of security and trust in one another. This confidence that as a country, we’ll tackle it together or we’ll suffer together. That’s a positive, satisfying feeling to know that we’re going to be okay together.

What’s also interesting and related to that, and a finding that I think is relevant for we North Americans and other people in the world, is that these Nordic countries also have much lower levels of income inequality. So, when you look at Canada as an example, our top one percent of wealthiest people own way more than 25% of the wealth of the whole nation. This obviously has profound impacts, and one of them from a happiness utility perspective is that the rich don’t really get a lot more happiness. In fact, none that’s measurable from getting an extra hundred thousand dollars if they’re already a multi-millionaire, does that make sense? You’re not any happier. But for people in the lower half of the income distribution, for them, a little bit more money can make a big difference. If there’s food insecurity or housing insecurity, a thousand or five thousand dollars more in the year is a big deal. And while we know that happiness does not go up progressively through all levels of income, at the lowest levels of income, it makes a big difference to happiness. So, there’s something there to be thought through with respect to public policy and the way that our governments manage the deliberate policy outcomes of their legislation and regulatory decisions. Less income inequality would be good.

Then I want to kind of conclude with this thought. You know, what do you do with this? This is a global report, and what does it mean for you? Well, maybe not a lot. The report itself may not be relevant to your personal life, but don’t let that be discouraging at all because there’s a ton that individuals can do. And the science is really clear. People who learn more about happiness, the interventions, the ways that we become happy, in fact, grow happier. So, if we get the knowledge, and then we apply it, we take action in our lives, the science is really, really clear. You’re not stuck at one level of happiness, but you can go happier. So, if you’re wondering what to do, well, go explore my channel here on YouTube or any number of other good authors and people working in this field, and learn some stuff, apply it in your life, and you, in fact, will grow happier. And then there’s kind of this interesting little social benefit. The research is also very clear about this idea of emotional contagion, that if you go happier, the people around you will grow happier, and to significant degrees of separation. So that people you don’t know will get happier as a result of you getting happier. So, if a bunch of us got invested in growing happier personally, then maybe we could change that World Happiness Report and see a trend turning around. Just a thought. Have a great day. Hope you enjoyed the video. If you like it, click the like button. Share this video with your friends and family, and you, in so doing, can make the world a slightly happier place. Bye for now. We’ll see you next week.