[imagesource:  Lauri Rotko]

Happiness seems like a far-flung folktale at this exact moment, but still, I suppose pockets of it do exist.

The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network knows how to find those pockets of happiness with its World Happiness Report, sending out a global survey to people in 150 countries.

The report looks at happiness around the world and finds the happiest nations, those at the very bottom of the happiness scale, and everything in between.

The key findings for 2022, despite these last couple of years of incessant loss of life and growing uncertainty, shows that there is actually a bit of hope for humanity, per CNN:

“The big surprise was that globally, in an uncoordinated way, there have been very large increases in all the three forms of benevolence that are asked about in the Gallup World Poll,” John Helliwell, one of the report’s three founding editors, told CNN Travel.

Donating to charity, helping a stranger and volunteering are all up, “especially the help to strangers in 2021, relative to either before the pandemic or 2020, by a very large amount in all regions of the world,” said Helliwell.

That is excellent news indeed. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, people will need to work together to “offset, to some degree, the tragedies affecting Ukrainians,” Helliwell said.

This year’s happiness rankings used data from surveys conducted well before the invasion, but Ukraine and Russia both fall into the bottom half of world rankings for happiness in the 2022 report, with Ukraine at 98 on the list and Russia at 80.

Afghanistan is the unhappiest nation at position 146, which Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, another report editor, said was “a stark reminder of the material and immaterial damage that war does to its many victims”.

I’ve given you ample time to guess where the world’s happiest country is with that preamble, so, can you take a guess?

Indeed, the happiest nation for this year – the fifth year in a row – is Finland:

Image: Irene Stachon/AP

The Nordic country and its neighbors Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland all score very well on the measures the report uses to explain its findings: healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support in times of trouble, low corruption and high social trust, generosity in a community where people look after each other and freedom to make key life decisions.

Gosh, yes, must be nice.

South Africa came in at number 101, wedged between Guinea and Turkey.

The world’s happiest countries for 2022 are:

1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Iceland
4. Switzerland
5. Netherlands
6. Luxembourg
7. Sweden
8. Norway
9. Israel
10. New Zealand
11. Austria
12. Australia
13. Ireland
14. Germany
15. Canada
16. United States
17. United Kingdom
18. Czechia (Czech Republic)
19. Belgium
20. France

In contrast, here are the bottom 10. The numbers are, in order, 2021 score, 2020 score, and the country’s population:

Image: World Population Review

[source:cnn]