it seems faintly ridiculous that Finland would rate as the happiest place on earth but for reasons that even confounded Finn's the United Nations 2018 world happiness report ranked the Nordic nation number one the next list comes out tomorrow meeting today is possibly the last day that Finland holds the title we visited the reigning champions of joy to see what makes them so happy are you happy did you see this story yes I see this many times Santa I wonder why actually I'm like literally about to kill myself standing in the square for like 20 minutes
these are kind of a hard contract especially at autumn and winter yet so I mean it takes a lot of yes something in our spirit to be able to live yeah [Music] explain the finished person to man the finished quality well quite quiet we are quite serious we like to spend time alone suicide rates kind of high here but it's good work every yeah well and you like living here well sometimes Koreans sometimes if you come over here in the summertime everybody's much more open and beer and now in the winter time when start raining
sucks so how do finns battle this demoralizing weather in a country that's drenched in darkness half the year well they just pretend to do happy summer things that's not warm enough everyone always thinks about you know that you know the darkness and how difficult it must be but when you actually grow up here you just sort of learn to live with it but that's rather different than being happy about it isn't it when I seen the reviews with the happiest place in the world is it's quite hard for me to understand yeah the masses might
seem sullen but Finnish happiness researcher Frank Martella thinks the country's top ranking makes a certain amount of sense they are measured like life satisfaction and we know from research like that the factors like you know like how wealth in the countries and also like how broad the social network system is and how much people's trust in the institution and what is the situation with the democracy these factors like unlike Kings have like came to predict like high life satisfaction countries that scored high on income life expectancy and social support all which contribute to one's sense
of well-being have topped the list for several years running in other words if you live in a Nordic welfare state the UN suspects you're probably happy one way of like defining measuring happiness about life satisfaction how satisfied are you with your life on the whole and intentional measures Finland seems to be like in the top but then when you measure happiness like positive emotions like joy joyfulness and how much do you smile every day and so forth where is Finland on that scale not close to the top at all at the top of that scale
are cheerful if impoverished latin-american countries like Paraguay and Guatemala problem the word happiness is the like Noah everybody seems to define it in different ways as a researcher like I said that you know we should not get rid of the word happiness what term would you prefer is used I would prefer it like we have like a few separate words like positive emotions life satisfaction meaningfulness and like cities and seasons as three separate things when you walk on the streets in Finland people don't seem to be particularly happy and I was actually thinking that that
might like actually contribute positively to our sense of satisfaction because like we know that when we think about our happiness or when we judge our own lives we are quite as comparing us to the other people so if you live among people where everybody's not advertising their own happiness like tell in a cage look at me how happy I am that might actually make you like more sad [Music] so after spending some time in Finland I've determined that the UN is partially right this country is not particularly happy that me was pretty grim but well
they're probably not the happiest people who look planet I think they're the most content people in the planet as in Finland is it's not happy this is the wrong word it's a bad translation right you
