What makes me happy is... I think I was definitely born happy and then life happens. I'm getting a bit emotional here. I feel very happy. Very happy.
I'm happier now. than when I lived in New York. And I got paid probably twice as much in New York as I do here.
Our happiness is kind of like quiet happiness, kind of a stillness. What does it take to be happy? The Nordic countries seem to have it all figured out.
Finland and Denmark have consistently topped the United Nations'most prestigious index, the World Happiness Report. in all six areas of life satisfaction. How have they cracked the formula?
And are the people there really the happiest? The United Nations just named the happiest place on Earth. It is not Disney World. It's Finland.
In 2019, the World Happiness Report named Finland the happiest country in the world for the second year in a row. Denmark came in second place after claiming the top slot in 2013. and 2016. Year after year, Nordic countries like Norway, Iceland, and Sweden round out the top of the list. Enter Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia and the co-editor of the World Happiness Report. What do those countries have? They have a high level of prosperity to be sure, but they're not the richest countries in the world by any means.
The idea is a good balance of life. You don't have to get super rich to be happy, they believe. In fact, if someone's super rich, they look, what's wrong with that person? So they're not societies that are aiming for all of the effort and time to becoming gazillionaires. They're looking for a good balance of life, and the results are extremely positive.
The annual happiness ranking began in 2012, but we can trace measuring happiness back to 1971. It came in the inspiration of the country of Bhutan, a country in the Himalayas that many people know for its innovation of attempting to measure gross national happiness. Globally, a standard for measuring success and productivity is gross national product. Bhutan had the bright idea of trying to measure happiness. Measuring happiness is a fairly complicated business.
First of all, We need to understand what happiness means. It means the satisfaction with the way one's life is going. It's not primarily a measure of whether one laughed or smiled yesterday, but how one feels about the course of one's life.
Meet Mike Viking, happiness researcher and CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Denmark. There's a lot of factors that impact happiness, everything from biology to... income levels, to the city they live in. But I think the best predictor we see in the data of whether people are happy or not is whether they're satisfied or happy with their relationships. So do we have somebody we can rely on in times of need?
Do we have somebody we can share hopes and worries with? These six categories help account for the differences in life satisfaction around the world. GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, Social support, generosity, and absence of corruption. On average, richer countries are happier.
On average, richer people are happier. But once we get to a certain level of income, additional $100 a month is not going to impact how people feel about their lives. So with money, like with everything else, we see diminishing marginal return.
And I don't know why I'm bringing up this quote because it's extremely corny, but there is a Kanye West song in which he says that having money is not everything not having it is. And I do think that's true in the sense that when you don't have it, it's all you worry about. And when you do have money, you can actually worry about other stuff.
Happiness also seems like this elusive thing. We have two words for happiness in Danish. So we have lykke, which is the elusive thing, the thing you experience once every blue moon. And then we have to be glad. like the word glad, which is different because it's more down to earth.
And you can be glad despite the fact that it's not anything special. It's no special day. Lykke seems like this elusive thing that you can't quite chase.
To be glad is more like our mind. So I feel more like I choose to be glad at times rather than sort of trying to chase happiness, because that seems like it's never going to happen that way. Maria lives in Helsinki with her husband, Duke, and her two-year-old son, Luca. Aha, yes, there it is!
There it is, the monster! Finland is the best place to have kids. When you go give birth, it's almost free.
We stayed in the hospital three full days as a family. We had our own family room, and we got meals and support and help and everything, and the bill was about 300 euros in the end. It's basically like living in a hotel.
In Finland, new mothers receive a free baby box, jam-packed with 63 items to help with the baby's first year. You don't have to buy anything for the first two, three months. Of course, diapers and stuff like that, but basically.
And also, you can actually put your baby to sleep in that box. Our baby actually, Luca, slept in the box for the first month. Finland, along with the other Nordic countries, offers generous parental leave. Anu Partanen, author of The Nordic Theory of Everything, spent 10 years as a journalist in the U.S. before returning to her home country, Finland.
She's also a mother. In Finland, you get 10 months of paid parental leave, out of which about four months is set aside for the mother, and you start it before the baby is born. And then father can keep nine weeks. Typically, both parents stay home for the first three weeks.
They share the rest of the time until the baby is nine months old. A parent can even stay home until the child is three years old and keep his or her job. However, the stipend is much smaller. Another determinant of well-being is one sense of personal freedom to make important life choices.
Can you shape your life the way you want? Christina was unhappy at her job in advertising and took an eight-month break. Social security is also something I think is very important. What I did didn't make me happy and it didn't let me have that work-life balance that we cherish. so much here.
And so we have a system that made it possible for me to quit my job and have some thinking time and figure out, you know, what's my next step in life. Christina received about $2,000 a month from the Danish government while she was unemployed. She is now in school to become a painter. Her tuition is covered and she receives an educational stipend of about $1,000 a month. Two of the biggest perks of life in Denmark and Finland?
are free education and free health care. Income taxes are not at all as high in the Nordic countries that Americans tend to think. However, overall, it is completely true that the Nordic countries collect more taxes in general than the United States does. In Finland and the Nordic countries, there are higher taxes on consumption, like eating in restaurants and buying jeans.
But the thing that I think a lot of Americans forget is that the Nordic people are happy to pay those taxes because they get services in return. Daycare, great public education, it includes your college, tuition free, it includes healthcare. All of those are included in your taxes.
When the news hit that Finland is the happiest country in the world, I think most people kind of reacted to it like... What are they talking about? We don't think of ourselves as very happy because it's dark and gloomy in the winter and whatever. It's easier for Finns and Danes to shape their lives because the government supports so many of their basic needs. The American dream is probably more alive in Denmark.
The perception of freedom is probably also a little bit different. It seems like in the U.S. the feeling is you have to be protected. from the government and you have to have freedom from the government.
I think in Denmark the sense is that the government protects you. People trust other people. You leave a bag in a restaurant in Finland, you're pretty sure you're going to make it back and the money is still there.
People even leave babies parked in strollers outside coffee shops while they run errands. And I think partly the Nordic society cultivates that trust simply by providing basic services for everyone, so there's much less poverty. Much less feeling of injustice, inequality, crime.
People get the education they need. They can have a job, they can work, they don't have to struggle in life as much. There isn't super wealth and there's absolutely no super poverty. Everybody participates.
It turns out it leads to a wonderful kind of life and one that is expressed year after year as making these countries the happiest countries in the world. Monica and Alex are expats who live in Copenhagen with their two teenagers. Alex is originally from the UK, and Monica is originally from New York.
What else do you need? Olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Where's the bowling? We originally came here expecting to stay only three years, but it was so good.
I've been here nine now. It's also safe, and this comes back to the community and the trust. We can let our kids go out, and we do not have to sit here being really worried that are they going to come back, are they safe where they're going, do we have to go pick them up.
We still worry, of course, but it's just very different. There's still this very strong sense of family, friends, community. Balance is the formula for happiness.
Aristotle had it right when he launched the study of happiness 2,300 years ago. According to Aristotle's golden mean, good behavior lies between two vices, excess and deficiency. People who pursue only money and say, I'll be happier the richer I am, turn out to be less happy.
I do think having nice surroundings. is a part of happiness, but I also think it needs to be linked with something that that sort of resonates with you on a deeper level. Having nice surroundings and having a lot of money and being in a five-star hotel in Las Vegas doesn't make you happy at all.
So I think it needs to have that balance. Cue the classic Nordic work-life balance. Rich Perussi, former New Yorker, has been living in Copenhagen for seven years. People stay pretty tight to nine to five work day.
But I do think that we get as much done in a short period of time here as we were doing in longer times working in New York. One of the comments we actually heard when we first came here was a Dane saying, when you see someone working late, are they doing it because they can't get their work done? Is there something wrong with them versus are they just trying to get ahead and working?
There is a sense that, yes, work's important and you need to get your work done to a high quality, but you also need to make sure it's balanced appropriately. Sara Alhupuro is a diplomat and an artist who has shaped her work schedule to make time for her passion. So I actually need to go to my physical workplace only three days a week. So then the rest of the time I can spend here in the middle of nature. When I walk in the forest, I walk there very quietly.
Paying attention to all the small details and all the colors. Very slowly and I try to spot all the small, small details. And I completely lose the track of time.
Usually I spend about five to six hours picking mushrooms. People don't make as much money in the Nordic countries. as they do in the U.S.
So it's not really about how much you make. You don't have to make as much to get the same quality of life as you would in the United States. So if we look at the dimension called life satisfaction, we can see that money does matter for well-being and happiness. But, I mean, on average, richer countries are happier.
On average, richer people are happier. But the mechanism here is being without money is a cause of unhappiness. Not everyone likes to talk about money either.
In Finland, it's been this kind of rule that you don't talk about money that much. At least, like, my parents basically wouldn't tell me how much they made, for example, if I would ask as a kid. It would be considered bragging if you would tell about how much you make, etc. People are happier when they are generous and when they feel that the society that they're in is a generous society.
And then we find people... want to live in places with decent government. If government is corrupt, if leaders are bizarre or autocratic or corrupt, the society is unhappy. In 2019, Finland elected the world's youngest serving prime minister, 34-year-old Sanna Marin.
Danes are among the happiest people in the world, but they're not necessarily the friendliest. Lars A. P., author of Effing Flink and founder of the movement of the same name, wants to change that. So Effing Flink is a national movement.
Our prime goal is to take Danes that are among the happiest people in the world, but also being the friendliest people in the world. Why are we doing this? Well, because friendliness and positive human interaction means so much to us.
Science shows us that. And so we're trying to do that in all sectors and all realms that we can think of. Finland and Denmark both have populations of less than 6 million people. The U.S. has over 330 million people. The Nordic countries are pretty homogeneous, too.
Do population size and diversity affect happiness? A lot of countries with relatively homogeneous population similarities among people ethnically or in terms of religion and so on are not very happy, so it's no guarantee. And on the other hand, it's possible to have a lot of diversity and more happiness.
Our northern neighbor in the United States, Canada, ranks higher. Yeah, I think that Finland is probably one of the most homogeneous countries in Europe. Still, we have recently had quite a lot of immigration, but I would say that still it is fairly homogeneous.
I think it's funny. Because I kind of always, I guess, assumed that Danish society was kind of diverse. But then we went to see Dave Chappelle's show here in Copenhagen, and both him and the guy who he had with him as support kind of opened their show saying, Denmark is so white. And I never really thought about that before, but then ever since that show, I just think about it all the time. We've been having immigration for Hundreds of years from all over Europe.
I mean, in the 70s, we had a lot of people from Turkey coming up, from Vietnam. We had people from Yugoslavia in the 90s. And Denmark has remained happy throughout that period.
The 2018 World Happiness Report explores happiness among natives and immigrants. It shows that when immigrants are happy, the countries are too. But if the country is already happy...
New immigrants will experience increased happiness. It shouldn't undermine happiness in the Nordic countries that there are influx of people born abroad. There's also a dark side to happiness. Like in Denmark, one of the biggest epidemics right now is stress and people being sick with stress and having to leave their jobs and people outside of Denmark. I didn't really understand what that meant, like what do you mean stress leave?
But it might be that expectation to have a work-life balance here that stresses people out, that you both have to work, but you also have to take care of your family, you also have to be social with your friends, you also have to do this self-realization thing, hobbies and traveling. There's so much you have to do in the same amount of hours, whereas maybe in New York or other places. You know that you're going to work to 10 every day, so you don't expect to have the same balance, you know? It can be hard for outsiders to break into the Nordic cultures.
The Danes have such tight-knit friend and family groups. It's not very natural for them to just include people, new people, into their groups. It is a little hard when you come in from the outside to sort of become part of that group. We've had some great Danish friends. Some metal work, but it is harder, I think, on that side compared to the UK and the US in terms of developing friendships.
There can be serious side effects to maintaining high levels of happiness. Within the States, if you look at the level of life satisfaction, the higher the life satisfaction, actually also the slightly higher the level of suicide rates. And the theory here is that it might be more difficult to be unhappy. in an otherwise happy society because it creates a stronger contrast to how you are feeling if you are surrounded by very happy people.
So Denmark actually used to have really high suicide rates. So in 1980 we had suicide rates of around 40 per 100 000 which was I think some of the highest in the world. Now fortunately it's around 25 percent of that so it's around 10 per 100 000. South Korea and Lithuania have some of the highest suicide rates in the OECD as of 2017. So fortunately, suicide rates have been reduced a lot in Denmark.
Also in Finland, there's also been a great reduction over the past few decades. But still, it's not zero. So we still need to reduce that even further. Despite mental health challenges, a big part of Finnish culture focuses on overall well-being.
Sauna is a sacred thing. for friends. I have like so many good memories about having these sauna moments with my family. Sauna is something that I suppose you kind of have to like. like and love as a Finn.
As of 2018, there were 5.5 million people living in Finland and around 2.3 million saunas. My grandmother always used to tell us kids that we can't fight in the sauna because then we would risk angering the sauna elf. And there's even a sauna in the government of Finland where they say that they make...
some of the most important political compromises because you're culturally not allowed to fight in the sauna. Danes have mastered the art of comfort and coziness through hygge. I think the best short definition of what hygge is, is the art of creating a nice atmosphere. And of course that is something that happens everywhere.
But what is uniquely Danish is we have a word that describes that situation. You can curl up on a couch and read a good book and have good music on and just be in a hyggekool. It actually means a hygge corner of your room.
There's a social component to hygge, which I think is really important. Hygge seeps everywhere throughout the country, from cozy drinks to warm lighting. So one concrete manifestation of hygge is the focus on lighting.
The rule of thumb is the warmer the light, the more hyggelig the light. So Danes love candles. So how does hygge contribute to happiness?
So happiness is both having a strong sense of purpose in life. It's also experiencing moments of pleasure on a daily basis. It's also feeling satisfied with life overall.
So hygge is this element in our daily lives where we experience comfort and pleasure and togetherness. And hopefully over time that accumulates also to... A higher sense of life satisfaction. Another way Denmark and Finland support their citizens?
Paid annual vacation. So in all Nordic countries everybody has a right to paid annual vacation. It varies a little by country, but in Finland, for example, it's typically after you work one year for the same employer, it's four weeks in the summer and one week in the winter, and everybody gets this. I actually heard a statistic, it's something like when Americans go home after work October 27th, you guys have worked as much as Danes will work for the entire year.
But I actually think that taking a little more time off also makes you a lot more productive. In Finland, it's traditional to spend the summer in a summer cottage, or muki. We did have a summer house when I was little.
It was something that my grandfather built himself. During the 60s I think. And we used to go there all the time when I was small.
A week doesn't go past during the summer when I'm not thinking like, oh, I wish we still had it. Traditionally the mökkis wouldn't have necessarily electricity or running water. And usually most mökkis come with a lake or the Baltic Sea. You can go to your sauna and have a dip in the water.
So in a Nordic country, the vacation time also serves families that if the parents stagger their vacations a bit, they can handle much easier the summer vacations for their children. And of course then the family can spend time together. Maybe Finnish happiness is more like inside, you know, it's like an inner peace or something like that, that it's not so open.
It's like a balance. It's more balance, I think. So, ready?
Ultimately, Happiness is relative. If you think you're having more sex than your neighbor, then you're happier. We are social beings, we compare ourselves to each other. So there are social comparisons in salary, in terms of houses, and how successful we believe we are, but also in terms of sex.
So what's one small way we can be happier today? For me, something that I've done which has made me happier. Is exercise.
I think the saying no or being a tiny bit more selfish can make you happy. One step to improve your sense of happiness is go first. So you're walking down the street, someone else comes walking towards you. It might be just a smile, it might be just looking the other person in the eye, whatever it is.
But go first with that because you can't expect that the other person is going to do it. Don't be reactive, go first. In Denmark we...
We sometimes talk about the ABC for mental health, if you want to boost your mood. Three sort of universal tips is doing something active, doing something together with other people, and doing something meaningful. So gather a group of friends, go for a walk.
That could be something that could boost your mood. Predicting the future on this is very difficult, unfortunately. Where will the US be?
It could be even worse than now. It could be much better than now. It's a matter of actually making choices for a better direction for the country and one that is not guided by fear and hate but one that is guided by a sense of community and the common good.