Finland is named the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row, according to the World Happiness Report 2025 published Thursday.
Other Nordic countries are also once again at the top of the happiness rankings in the annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Besides Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden remain the top four and in the same order.
Country rankings were based on answers people give when asked to rate their own lives. The study was done in partnership with the analytics firm Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
When it comes to decreasing happiness — or growing unhappiness —the United States has dropped to its lowest-ever position at 24, having previously peaked at 11th place in 2012. The report states that the number of people dining alone in the United States has increased 53% over the past two decades.
Finland technically doesn’t have complete separation of religion from state and has a really proto-fascist set of state symbols, though, part from the Russian Empire, part from the White Guard.
Just since it’s a functioning nation, these things don’t affect it much.
Also unlike, say, Sweden, Finland never fully jumped on the multiculturalism train and such.
One can say honesty and true moderation make you happy.
I’ve never been in Finland, though, what I can say of why being in Estonia (not living there though) makes you feel happy - it’s like Russia in my childhood (hard to explain), but clean and fixed and without tasteless expensive things everywhere (ugly malls, ugly decoration, ugly everything, people deciding on how things look nice in Russia have taste worse than average ; maybe in Moscow this is simply because people with money who moved there from outside think this is how things are done in Moscow, people don’t just live here, it’s a matter of prestige that a fscking barbershop should look like a mafia meeting place or Gringotts bank entrance, btw bank offices are actually kinda normal in appearance ; and places you need to actually visit are behind some unnumbered door under a leaking pipe). Still many bad things feel similar to Russia too, but that’s likely just autistic experience.