My Miserable Week in the “Happiest Country on Earth”
May 14, 2025 at 12:51AMA few years ago, Molly Young detailed her pandemic-inspired effort to “find little harebrained ways to warp reality“—an effort whose absurd outcomes were keenly observed, and surface in my mind perhaps once a week. No longer confined to her home, and incited by Finland’s eight-year streak atop the World Happiness Report, Young travels to Helsinki. There, her mood quickly darkens—something salmon soup vendors and an astonishing number of saunas per capita can’t fix. Young’s travelogue is full of sensory pleasure. A dip into icy water leaves her with “a sense that my cells were being arranged.” The subsequent sauna makes her body feel “as though it were outlined in a neon pen.” A public library resembles thickly frosted carrot cake. Her gloom persists, but it also reveals something about the contentment we desire for ourselves and project, inaccurately, onto others.
Each country is ranked according to a score derived from the Cantril Ladder responses. Finland’s current score is 7.736, while the United States measures 6.724, about a ladder rung lower. If you look at it another way, Americans are 87 percent as happy as Finns. That’s not bad. What seems to bother American readers about the report is that it’s a game we’re not winning — indeed, it’s a game we’re losing to our closest neighbors, Mexico (No. 10) and Canada (No. 18). Year after year the PDFs track our downward trajectory, past Lithuania and Slovenia and the United Arab Emirates.
If Americans are exceptional in our approach to happiness, it may have to do with an insistence on treating the matter as a glittering mystery, a thing requiring pilgrimage or a course at Harvard or Yale (both schools have offered happiness classes) to understand. It’s a quandary we’re tasked with solving — as with many quandaries in this country, like taxes and health insurance and self-defense — on our own. In a land of maximal freedom, where the coffee cups are huge, we can just as easily imagine ourselves becoming billionaires or dying on a street corner. The span of the ladder is as wide as our imaginations allow.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/13/happiness-finland-saunas/
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