I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method. The paper referred to does not. It uses a special US dataset for states and a much smaller global dataset for every other country, then treats the results as if they measure the same thing. This setup almost guarantees that US states look unusually good. The authors present this as evidence, but it mostly reflects differences in survey design rather than real differences in wellbeing. In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
In case others are wondering what the one simple question is (called the Cantril Ladder):
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”
Personally feels a little more convoluted than just asking "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?"
I'm not a psychology expert but from stuff I read I bet the reason they don't ask "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?" is they tried that and found the same person would give different answers from day to day and moment to moment based on what is going on this very minute.
I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.
Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.
Happy have so many definition that I like the question better, it is much less ambiguous than "happy".
My happiness changes depending on many external factor and varies by hour and days, but the answer to the former question aren't going to change quite as often, would have probably provided the same answer over the entire year.
I have to say, I don’t understand what ”for you” means in ”best/worst possible life for you”. At first I read it roughly as ”given the fundamental unchanging circumstances of your life, such as where and when you were born, who your parents are, and your basic health” but maybe they mean something like ”in your subjective perspective on what is good/bad”?
What an interesting question. It would seem intuitively that a population with a limited band of socioeconomic mobility must answer 10 and one with a wide band of mobility must answer 0. I wonder whether that is true.
Your question is likely to be interpreted as you asking the person's current MOOD hence different answers on different times are likely. While you are thinking of a less changing wider concept.
The social context is important too, there is a social stigma around admitting that you are not happy which will play into this question too.
One way to interpret this is not as the author's endorsement of the other report, but as a demonstration of how fragile these happiness rankings are to perturbations in methodology / definition.
I am yet to be convinced that 4000 data points are sufficient to extrapolate how happy 2.8B people are in the world. (India and China) Especially when it deals with a complex topic as happiness without taking any cultural differences into account.
People on HN tend to argue it’s sufficient data to be statistically significant, but I don’t see how.
The substack references Nilsson et al [1] in regards to criticisms of the Cantril Ladder. It's a pretty easy to read paper so I highly suggest just reading it.
> I don't know. The World Happiness Report relies on one simple question, which is easy to criticise but at least it applies a clear and consistent method.
The simplicity is nice, but for the (probable) fact that suicide attempts/rates and emigration don't correspond... so lets not call it happiness.
I would like to rewrite it, replacing desires with hormones, since they are the drivers for desires, when young one could jump a wall, risking his/her life to see the one we desire, then in their fifties on a nude beach everybody looks and feels mundane.
The defining experience of our age seems to be biochemical hunger.
We're flooded with hormones that tell us to crave more, even when we already have more than we need.
We're starved for balance while stimuli multiply around us.
Our dopamine peaks and crashes without reason; our cortisol hums in the background like faulty wiring.
We live with a near-universal imbalance: the reign of thin hormones.
These thin hormones promise satisfaction but never deliver. They spike and vanish, leaving behind only the impulse to chase the next hit.
Philosophers once spoke of desires that change the self; today, our neurochemistry is being short-circuited before the self even enters the conversation.
A thick hormone is slower, steadier. It reshapes you in the process of living it—like the oxytocin that comes from trust, or the endorphins that build with persistence.
But thin hormones—those dopamine flickers from notifications, likes, and swipes—do nothing but reproduce themselves.
They deliver sensation without transformation, stimulation without growth.
Modern systems have perfected the art of hijacking our endocrine circuitry.
Social media fires the neurons of connection without the chemistry of friendship.
Porn delivers the hormonal spike of intimacy without the vulnerability that generates oxytocin.
Productivity apps grant the dopamine signature of accomplishment with nothing actually achieved.
We’ve built an economy not of meaning, but of molecules.
And none of it seems to be making us more alive.
"Pick a random number between 1 and 10" is also a clear and consistent method, and also not particularly meaningful.
The point I took from the article is that we should stop paying attention to this meaningless metric. I didn't read it as a request to replace it with another metric.
> In that sense the methodological problems here are more serious than the ones they point to in the World Happiness Report.
It's a simple question, sure, but it's not clear that it's a very meaningful one, even if other approaches aren't necessarily any better. When I think of the word happiness, I don't exactly associate it with suicide or rarely smiling.
I have lived in Finland for the past four years, having emigrated from the US like the other poster here, and the WHR is a common punching bag topic amongst locals here.
The odd thing however is that when I ask them whether they think the average Finn is happy, they say absolutely not, but when I ask them whether they themselves are happy, most of the time I get a "oh this place is actually pretty great for weirdos like me, I just mean like, normal people would hate it here". But that's the thing: No one normal chooses to live in Finland!
I'm brazillian, moved to Finland 2 years ago to work here, and can confirm the sentiment.
If you ask a Finn, most people are actually quite harsh to the Finnish government, economy, etc - specially as of recent, since Finland now has one of the worst unemployment rate in EU. But lifestyle here is quite sober, everyone has hobbies and are quite dedicated to them. I guess the Sauna and Avanto culture are the main happiness drivers here, and tbh after experiencing it, I wouldn't change for anything else.
This is a fairly common discrepancy between how people perceive the mean/median of a property is compared to the mean/median of how they themselves are.
You see it in things like business confidence going in both directions at various times, pessimism when things are going well, optimism when things are going poorly.
It is very convenient in politics, because you can choose which figure to report to make it seem like you are saying the same thing but you can switch between them to make things look good (or bad l, depending on your attention)
Friend of mine moved from Australia to Finland, and loved it there. I can't imagine dealing with all that cold after Aussie's wonderful heat, but he loved it.
Happiness is found in different places for different people, thankfully.
Even when it is extremely cold like -50 Celsius, one can still walk outside for hours with sufficiently warm clothes. But try the same when it is +50. And then spending weeks in air-conditioned apartments was strictly worse for me than in a heated home during the winter. Plus there is no insects when it is cold. So my preference is for colder climate.
Unrelated, but this reminds me of Americans' opinions of their congresscritters: Congresscritters as a whole are a terrible, corrupt bunch, but your own congresscritter is amazing!
Played hockey with several Finns. They always seemed grumpy about something. The Norwegians and Swedes I played soccer with always had a more cheerful disposition. They always made fun of the Northern Finns, saying, "You'd be grumpy AF too if you had to deal with Winter for 7 months every year!"
I'm Norwegian, and the Norwegian stereotype of Finnish people used to be that they are dour and introvert. And we're by and large culturally a lot less outwardly cheerful to people we don't know than the Danes.
Sometimes Norwegian TV would show Finnish dramas while I was growing up in the '80s, and the standing joke was that the typical Finnish drama had two guys hiking through the forest, one of them saying something, and then half an hour more of hiking before the other would reply. I don't remember whether that was accurate (it's not as if I'd have kept watching), but I suspect not.
A similar thing was recently reported for Germany as well. When asked how they believe the average German is doing, most people answered something along "worse than me".
As a US person, I have lived in Finland for 3 years, and I can assure you that the Finns are the most content people you can imagine! They can go months without talking to anyone and still consider themselves "happy", but the correct word in English is "content".
That report is correct, it just they advertise with the wrong word in the headline, I guess because it is more click-bate title than having it as "The most content country"
As Finn I would agree. Finland is fine. Not the greatest and not happiest. But overall it is fine still. In most areas cost of living is pretty reasonable, services are sufficient. Police for example does good enough job. Probably could earn more money somewhere else, but why bother...
You don't see many cops in Finland. You just don't.
Firstly because the social benefits system keeps a lot of people out of trouble ' call it bribery if you like, but it meets basic needs. Secondly because there's a lot of private "security" types around - for example in the supermarkets, keeping out drunks and dealing with shoplifters - letting the police focus on the real stuff.
It's extremely important if you're interested in social stability. Unhappy people have a tendency to turn authoritarian and lash about, hurting both their own society and anyone who looks different.
I dunno, "discontent" is a pretty politically charged word, going back to Shakespeare - "Now is the winter of our discontent" from Richard III is referring to an attempted political overthrow.
The only problem the author points out is that he doesn't like the Cantril Ladder question.
I get it if you feel like that question falls short of representing your own personal concept of happiness, but that question is the standard in positive psychology research for measuring self reported subjective well being, and hardly enough to say the report is "beset with methodological problems".
They give several well-considered criticisms of the question - it leads people to focus on socioecomonic status, it doesn't correlate with other measure like whether they report experiencing joy recently, etc. It's not much of a defense to simply say "well, it's the standard".
My criticism is about how the dramatic language differs from the banal content of the article.
Titling it "The World Happiness Report Is a Sham" and calling it "beset with methodological problems", I would expect some more serious scientific malpractices, like data fabrication, calculation errors, sampling problems, p-hacking, etc., not "I think there are some problems with this variable".
Is joy related to happiness, or are they two separate concepts? That depends on your cultural background and the languages you speak.
The World Happiness Report can be traced back to the UN General Assembly Resolution 65/309, which was proposed by Bhutan. Therefore the intended definition of happiness in this context is similar to the one in Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index.
The more practical problem is that the samples used in the Gallup World Poll are for largely unavoidable reasons small and not representative of entire country demographics; in particular respondents can skew richer and more educated than their national average in poorer countries.
> “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”
My immediate problem with this is the lower bound of responses in a given country would be determined by your perception of the safety nets available to you. Someone in a Scandinavian country where there are virtually no unsheltered homeless people probably doesn't index their zero to "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness," while an American who sees that regularly would.
That seems to be working as intended? The unhappiness of both "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness" and the constant gnawing fear that this is a realistic outcome due to medical bankruptcy or whatever should pull down a country's happiness index.
I've always figured that this is in fact a big reason why the Nordic countries do so well on the survey: the average is lifted not by shiny happy people holding hands, but by the strong safety net ensuring that you can't fall into a pit of despair.
You're misreading the comment. hamdingers is suggesting that the fear of "dying of exposure on the sidewalk" is inflating a country's happiness index, because people are using "dying of exposure on the sidewalk" as a realistic worst-case baseline.
Someone in a Scandinavian country is probably well informed of how terrible it is for the poorest and most vulnerable outside their country. The indexes are probably the same.
The person in the Scandinavian country, when asked this question, will think "hmm, well I am not in America, so I will add 3 steps to my answer" and, och se där, up they go to the top of the World Ranking.
Some might do that, but hopefully most people read the question properly and see it specifically asks about the situation for you, so thinking about the starving children in Gaza is not part of the question.
>...Someone in a Scandinavian country where there are virtually no unsheltered homeless people probably doesn't index their zero to "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness," while an American who sees that regularly would.
Maybe I am not understanding this - do you think the average American regularly sees people dying of exposure on the sidewalk? Or what do you mean?
When I was going to grad school in DC, I'd suggest to classmates that we place bets on the date of the first person dying of exposure in the city every winter.
This bet kinda horrified some people, but I think I got my point across.
>At a minimum, you would expect the happiest countries in the world to have some of the lowest incidences of adverse mental health outcomes. But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.
"Ecological fallacy! Ecological fallacy!," I screamed, flapping my arms pointlessly at my laptop.
I've just had this topic with friends. How can finland and the nordics be further up than, say, spain? Have they ever been? Sure, materialistic safety is better up there. But the way of living, at least in my experience, is way higher. Look at suicide rates and alcoholism and such.
ranked by suicide. If you visit it, and the vibes and feelings you have don't match the statistics, the statistics are shit I'd say. And maybe cities and rural areas destroy this statistic. But what do I know (but the article agrees with me)
Using suicide rates as a measure for population happiness is very peculiar, given that the people who commit suicide represent fractions of a percent, and would only ever sum up to a rounding error.
It's not that peculiar if you assume all countries follow the same type of happiness distribution that is simply shifted/stretched lower or higher.
Then, the relative size of a bottom or top absolute threshold is highly meaningful. Even if it's a fraction of a percent, populations are huge and suicide rates are not rounding errors at all -- they're actually quite statistically significant.
And as macabre as it is, suicides are objective facts mostly unaffected by methodology, and unaffected by translation issues, cultural differences, etc.
This is why suicide rates are actually a powerful mental health statistic, just like height is a powerful physical health statistic, at the population level. There's obviously still a lot both of these metrics don't say, but the fact that they are highly objective makes them extremely valuable.
QoL certainly has its effect on suicide rates. I assume that life is the shittier, the more people opt to leave on their own terms. Just look at russia, absolute shithole and it's on rank 11.
If people are happy, you have less suicides. I don't need a study for that.
There is also a religious element to suicide that cannot be overlooked.
Also, I Spain your view of Spain is tainted. I think very few people would choose an average city in Spain over e.g. Copenhagen where 20% of the Danish population live.
All the Spanish cities I've visited have looked "perfect", but there's a lot I don't see as a tourist, e.g. that Spain has one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe (10.5%).
The perception of Spain is much more positive in the Anglophone world - it's viewed as a country where cost of living is low, you can nap in the middle of the day, the women/men are hot and easy, the wine is great and cheap, and you can party late at night.
In reality the average Spaniard isn't experience the majority of that, as those are perceptions that arose from the rose-tinted glasses of tourists. Most tourists don't know about the Eurozone crisis, the regional disparity, and the consolidation of Spain's economic growth engines to 1-2 cities.
Spain is a good developed country with a decent QoL as is reflected by it's HDI and developmental indicators (and the fact that it has outpaced historically richer and more developed Italy is a testament to that), but tourists almost always take a rose-tinted view whereas locals almost always take a negative view.
And I think this is the crux of the issue with how the "World Happiness Index" is used in American discourse - in the US almost no one vists Europe or other parts of the World for extended periods of time and most Americans lack familial or social ties in Europe. As such, idealized images of Europe ("a socialist paradise" or "white Christendom under siege") have taken hold in popular discourse and are used as proxies for the American culture war.
Not for nothing, but I'm not sure that's a great metric. Venezuela for instance is 178, and it doesn't seem like an overly happy place to be these past few years.
Even if the question was perfectly unbiased and captured happiness, comparing scores from country to country are impossible because the scale differs from country to country.
A 10 in Afghanistan is not the same as a 10 in Canada. Societies have different perception of “the best” based on each individuals experience, what society values and what they think is possible.
So while helpful in tracking happiness over time within the same country, it can’t be used to compare countries.
As a Swede, I've always been confused by these results. The self image of Swedes is that we're fairly miserable on average, and don't know how to enjoy life as much as some people in warmer climates.
That said, note that both things mentioned in here will raise average happiness:
> But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.
I think (as a fellow Swede) that there is a culturally sense of guilt involved in having a comparatively comfortable life and not being happy about it, compounded by a sense of guilt that a comfortable life is somehow undeserved.
Saying you are unhappy is in a sense saying you need a better quality of life, or deserve more happiness, both of which are kind of taboo under the Law of Jante.
As an introvert living in Rio de Janeiro, I can tell you that a lot of being happier in a hot climate with a lot of people around is just a social mask.
When I start deep questions about financial safety, the future and so on, just by asking I can be labelled as a pessimist. And I'm far from that.
I'm a fairly resolved and confident introvert, but I know many timid people that feel ashamed that they don't feel "happy" in these large group of people, that are extremely agitated and yelling around to grab some piece of attention they need.
And what is being shown in social media, documentaries and etc is just one pov.
It's a good point about living in a hot climate often being associated with living a happy life. Although to what I've seen, there isn't much evidence for such a correlation.
Readit News
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?”
Personally feels a little more convoluted than just asking "How happy are you, on a scale of 0-10?"
I'd also bet that they found the above "convoluted" question was one that led to the same people giving more consistent answers from day to day and moment to moment.
Even if I'm wrong I hope you see this is a much thornier problem than just asking a question and assuming the answer tells us anything about the person taking the survey.
My happiness changes depending on many external factor and varies by hour and days, but the answer to the former question aren't going to change quite as often, would have probably provided the same answer over the entire year.
Now I know it's a metaphor and not a literal ladder, but it does make me wonder if that association skews the results at all..
Your question is likely to be interpreted as you asking the person's current MOOD hence different answers on different times are likely. While you are thinking of a less changing wider concept.
The social context is important too, there is a social stigma around admitting that you are not happy which will play into this question too.
Dead Comment
People on HN tend to argue it’s sufficient data to be statistically significant, but I don’t see how.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-52939-y.pdf
The simplicity is nice, but for the (probable) fact that suicide attempts/rates and emigration don't correspond... so lets not call it happiness.
We live with a near-universal imbalance: the reign of thin hormones. These thin hormones promise satisfaction but never deliver. They spike and vanish, leaving behind only the impulse to chase the next hit. Philosophers once spoke of desires that change the self; today, our neurochemistry is being short-circuited before the self even enters the conversation.
A thick hormone is slower, steadier. It reshapes you in the process of living it—like the oxytocin that comes from trust, or the endorphins that build with persistence. But thin hormones—those dopamine flickers from notifications, likes, and swipes—do nothing but reproduce themselves. They deliver sensation without transformation, stimulation without growth.
Modern systems have perfected the art of hijacking our endocrine circuitry. Social media fires the neurons of connection without the chemistry of friendship. Porn delivers the hormonal spike of intimacy without the vulnerability that generates oxytocin. Productivity apps grant the dopamine signature of accomplishment with nothing actually achieved. We’ve built an economy not of meaning, but of molecules. And none of it seems to be making us more alive.
The point I took from the article is that we should stop paying attention to this meaningless metric. I didn't read it as a request to replace it with another metric.
It's a simple question, sure, but it's not clear that it's a very meaningful one, even if other approaches aren't necessarily any better. When I think of the word happiness, I don't exactly associate it with suicide or rarely smiling.
The odd thing however is that when I ask them whether they think the average Finn is happy, they say absolutely not, but when I ask them whether they themselves are happy, most of the time I get a "oh this place is actually pretty great for weirdos like me, I just mean like, normal people would hate it here". But that's the thing: No one normal chooses to live in Finland!
If you ask a Finn, most people are actually quite harsh to the Finnish government, economy, etc - specially as of recent, since Finland now has one of the worst unemployment rate in EU. But lifestyle here is quite sober, everyone has hobbies and are quite dedicated to them. I guess the Sauna and Avanto culture are the main happiness drivers here, and tbh after experiencing it, I wouldn't change for anything else.
You see it in things like business confidence going in both directions at various times, pessimism when things are going well, optimism when things are going poorly.
It is very convenient in politics, because you can choose which figure to report to make it seem like you are saying the same thing but you can switch between them to make things look good (or bad l, depending on your attention)
Happiness is found in different places for different people, thankfully.
Sometimes Norwegian TV would show Finnish dramas while I was growing up in the '80s, and the standing joke was that the typical Finnish drama had two guys hiking through the forest, one of them saying something, and then half an hour more of hiking before the other would reply. I don't remember whether that was accurate (it's not as if I'd have kept watching), but I suspect not.
That report is correct, it just they advertise with the wrong word in the headline, I guess because it is more click-bate title than having it as "The most content country"
Firstly because the social benefits system keeps a lot of people out of trouble ' call it bribery if you like, but it meets basic needs. Secondly because there's a lot of private "security" types around - for example in the supermarkets, keeping out drunks and dealing with shoplifters - letting the police focus on the real stuff.
Deleted Comment
Unhappiness sounds much more pedestrian.
Deleted Comment
I get it if you feel like that question falls short of representing your own personal concept of happiness, but that question is the standard in positive psychology research for measuring self reported subjective well being, and hardly enough to say the report is "beset with methodological problems".
Titling it "The World Happiness Report Is a Sham" and calling it "beset with methodological problems", I would expect some more serious scientific malpractices, like data fabrication, calculation errors, sampling problems, p-hacking, etc., not "I think there are some problems with this variable".
The World Happiness Report can be traced back to the UN General Assembly Resolution 65/309, which was proposed by Bhutan. Therefore the intended definition of happiness in this context is similar to the one in Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index.
My immediate problem with this is the lower bound of responses in a given country would be determined by your perception of the safety nets available to you. Someone in a Scandinavian country where there are virtually no unsheltered homeless people probably doesn't index their zero to "dying of exposure on the sidewalk due to untreated mental illness," while an American who sees that regularly would.
I've always figured that this is in fact a big reason why the Nordic countries do so well on the survey: the average is lifted not by shiny happy people holding hands, but by the strong safety net ensuring that you can't fall into a pit of despair.
The person in the Scandinavian country, when asked this question, will think "hmm, well I am not in America, so I will add 3 steps to my answer" and, och se där, up they go to the top of the World Ranking.
> bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life >>>for you<<<.
..and when asked this, I believe they consider how bad it can get for them in their country.
Based on my experience living and talking with people in Scandinavia and eastern europe.
Maybe I am not understanding this - do you think the average American regularly sees people dying of exposure on the sidewalk? Or what do you mean?
This bet kinda horrified some people, but I think I got my point across.
Deleted Comment
"Ecological fallacy! Ecological fallacy!," I screamed, flapping my arms pointlessly at my laptop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy#Individual_...
I'll spoil it: - Finland 38 - Norway 71 - Spain 137
(fun fact: USA is 31)
ranked by suicide. If you visit it, and the vibes and feelings you have don't match the statistics, the statistics are shit I'd say. And maybe cities and rural areas destroy this statistic. But what do I know (but the article agrees with me)
Then, the relative size of a bottom or top absolute threshold is highly meaningful. Even if it's a fraction of a percent, populations are huge and suicide rates are not rounding errors at all -- they're actually quite statistically significant.
And as macabre as it is, suicides are objective facts mostly unaffected by methodology, and unaffected by translation issues, cultural differences, etc.
This is why suicide rates are actually a powerful mental health statistic, just like height is a powerful physical health statistic, at the population level. There's obviously still a lot both of these metrics don't say, but the fact that they are highly objective makes them extremely valuable.
If people are happy, you have less suicides. I don't need a study for that.
Also, I Spain your view of Spain is tainted. I think very few people would choose an average city in Spain over e.g. Copenhagen where 20% of the Danish population live.
Also a genetic component.
In reality the average Spaniard isn't experience the majority of that, as those are perceptions that arose from the rose-tinted glasses of tourists. Most tourists don't know about the Eurozone crisis, the regional disparity, and the consolidation of Spain's economic growth engines to 1-2 cities.
Spain is a good developed country with a decent QoL as is reflected by it's HDI and developmental indicators (and the fact that it has outpaced historically richer and more developed Italy is a testament to that), but tourists almost always take a rose-tinted view whereas locals almost always take a negative view.
And I think this is the crux of the issue with how the "World Happiness Index" is used in American discourse - in the US almost no one vists Europe or other parts of the World for extended periods of time and most Americans lack familial or social ties in Europe. As such, idealized images of Europe ("a socialist paradise" or "white Christendom under siege") have taken hold in popular discourse and are used as proxies for the American culture war.
A 10 in Afghanistan is not the same as a 10 in Canada. Societies have different perception of “the best” based on each individuals experience, what society values and what they think is possible.
So while helpful in tracking happiness over time within the same country, it can’t be used to compare countries.
That said, note that both things mentioned in here will raise average happiness:
> But it turns out that the residents of the same Scandinavian countries that the press dutifully celebrates for their supposed happiness are especially likely to take antidepressants or even to commit suicide.
Saying you are unhappy is in a sense saying you need a better quality of life, or deserve more happiness, both of which are kind of taboo under the Law of Jante.
When I start deep questions about financial safety, the future and so on, just by asking I can be labelled as a pessimist. And I'm far from that.
I'm a fairly resolved and confident introvert, but I know many timid people that feel ashamed that they don't feel "happy" in these large group of people, that are extremely agitated and yelling around to grab some piece of attention they need.
And what is being shown in social media, documentaries and etc is just one pov.