Amidst the global coronavirus Pandemic, talk of happiness might seem out of place. But, experts at the United Nations on Friday declared Finland to be the world’s happiest nation for the third year running. India ranks 10th in the list of unhappiest countries.
Researchers for the World Happiness Report asked people in 156 countries to evaluate their own levels of happiness and took into account measures such a GDP, Social support, personal freedom and levels of corruption to give each nation a happiness score.
The happiest countries are those where people feel a sense of belonging where they trust and enjoy each other and their shared institutions,” said John Helliwell, one of the report authors in a statement.
The countries at the bottom of this years’s ranking are those afflicted by violent conflicts and extreme poverty, with Zimbabwe, South Sudan and Afghanistan and are the world’s lest happy countries.
A per research, Finland is a country whose population of 5.5 million is said to shy away from spontaneous demonstrations of joy, valuing instead the solitude of the forests and thousands of lakes.
The data for this years’ World Happiness report was collected in 2018 and 2019, and is therefore not impacted by the widespread restrictions imposed because of the spread of the new Coronavirus. Paradoxically, the reports’s authors believe that the lockdown conditions could actually boost up our happiness index in the future. This could be because people are often surprised by the commitment of the government, social workers and our medical staff to work in harmony and help each other.