The abstract: “ It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.”
I guess a Buddhist point of view would be that any emotion/feeling should not be held on to. (It is best to feel and let all things pass, I think, but to consider it a disorder to "hold on" to happiness doesn't seem right...I am not well-read enough about it to know if it can in fact cause suffering)
I think social media is being wrongly made in to a scapegoat
Rather, social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at, of not having meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, of lacking certain other things that may have existed in the past.
Social media offers a new engaging experiment that fills the void of some of these things that don't exist elsewhere otherwise but doesn't act as an equivalent replacement
Social media companies are actors that actively compete for the attention of young people. That does result in collapsing third spaces and social events because it’s easier/cheaper to just post on IG or hang out on discord.
The term 'social media' has changed a lot over time. The attention grabbing kind we have today is a very different beast than what we started out with; no ads and only a chronological timeline showing posts from your network.
The original kind was genuinely connecting people and adding value. The current one is in effect isolating and driving people and groups apart.
Luckily, the original kind did not vanish. I find a lot of joy hanging out on the fediverse. I spend far less time on it than what I did on Twitter of FB back when I still had accounts there, but that is a good sign.
Social media is too generous term to use when describing products from Meta, TikTok, Snap, X etc. It is an ad platform that also, occasionality, shows you what your friends are up to.
We should come up with a better term than 'social media' when describing platforms that has reached the last stage of enshitification.
I was not an athlete growing up. Didn't do much in organized sports. But all three of my kids play a team sport. It does wonders for them. I really helped them get out of the pandemic. But having them outside several hours a week, working with peers and other adults, practicing new skills. Really cool to see and I think it really helped their mental health (and by extension, my own).
FYI: This world happiness report is entirely based on asking just one obtuse question, which does not even have the word happiness in the actual question:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. 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. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
It looks to me that this refers to a 272 page PDF report [0] on the theme "Happiness and Social Media" and the Executive summary explains that it is about much more than that simple question.
Pretty good question I would say. It’s rating your life on a scale of 1 to 10. That being said it doesn’t gauge actual happiness. For instance the Nordic countries have very high levels of depression with a third of the some countries being on antidepressants. As a whole I would say on a day to day basis people are much more ebullient and happy seeming in a lot of other places like the Mediterranean. I would wager that this doesn’t capture the percentage of time people are “happy”.
It's especially hard to express "happiness" across languages. It's a word that is hard to define and generally has no perfect synonyms between languages. It ranges broadly from "present feeling of contentment" to "ultimate feeling of fulfillment in life," and it seems like the survey is aiming for the latter aspect. Therefore the ladder analogy is a decent way to communicate that.
This isn’t gauging happiness but rather if your country is fulfilling your aspirations. I bet someone that works in a role he didn’t really want still might be very happy on a day to day basis but he never had the chance to become the doctor or botanist he always wanted to be.
An obvious issue with the metaphor that comes to mind is that if you consider yourself to have a pretty good life, to be overall happy and satisfied, but you think it's possible to have an objectively much better life, then you'd rank yourself relatively low. And vice versa, if you think your life sucks but it could be much worse you'd rank yourself relatively high.
If the society/culture you are living within. Is well off, but swamped with cravings that it could be better. Then you are less happy.
This study isn't trying to measure how 'materially well off you are', it is happiness. So if you are un-satisfied even with your big house, and un-happy, that still says something.
Same problem as rating your pain on the pain scale: is 10 the worst pain I've experienced, or the worst I can imagine? Because I've got a... very vivid imagination. And still, that's the best we can do. I blame an imperfect universe.
Doesn't that almost imply the happiest countries in the world have a lack of imagination on what could be better? Or maybe they don't suffer from comparison (the thief of joy) as a culture.
I'd argue it's likelier that people are more informed about their absolute position globally. Any screen gets you the mental image of the top of the ladder. So happy people would end up scoring themselves low, because there's a globalized vision of wealth nowadays.
Besides there's a difference in life self-evaluation and experienced happiness, so the report really is a misnomer.
Canada here. Feels like we're barely hanging on to rung 5 or 6 and about to fall to the bottom.
Quantifiable example: most recent jobs report we lost 100k+ full time jobs. Biggest job less since COVID. Or the fact our increase in GDP per capita is the (second?) worst in the OECD in the last 10 years. Worse than Japan, Italy, the UK and all the other laggards...
> Canada here. Feels like we're barely hanging on to rung 5 or 6 and about to fall to the bottom.
The Missing Middle podcast went into this in a recent episode, and it's age-dependent: older folks are happier (i.e., they have purchased homes), while younger folks are less happy (cost of living). We Canadians basically have age-dependent wealth-class nowadays.
The fact boomers have it so good yet our ranking is dropping like a rock tells you just how bad it is for the working class, especially those who don't have government jobs...
Also Canada, and I disagree pretty strongly with your post. Those two statistics have little bearing on happiness. Housing costs and healthcare access are much bigger concerns.
They are concerns, but not all that closely tied to happiness. Research shows time and time again that deep social connection is the key, if you will, to happiness.
> Research shows time and time again that deep social connection is the key, if you will, to happiness.
Research suggests it, but it does not show it. Psychological research is notoriously unscientific, with most studies not even being replicable because humans are extremely complex and it's basically impossible to design any kind of methodology that concretely controls for all variables, all the more so when we have things like 'ethics' that make it even harder to do controlled resaerch.
It is absolutely possible to be happy without deep social connection. I am an absolute misanthrope, I seriously hate every one of you bastards, but I'm pretty damn happy. The key to my happiness is that I live a comfortable life and have the freedom to spend it creating (and consuming) things I love - art, music, games, software. If I had to instead spend my days labouring on a farm, if I didn't have indoor plumbing and air conditioning, didn't have access to healthcare and stability and security, etc. I would be absolutely miserable. My happiness is only possible due to the great economic conditions and sensible policies of my country.
> It is absolutely possible to be happy without deep social connection.
Well, of course it is. No matter what you think it is that brings happiness to the general population, there will be at least someone who doesn't find happiness in it. There are always outliers.
> If I had to instead spend my days labouring on a farm
Farms are where you find the intersection of all cool tech. I have to wonder how someone who enjoys creating and consuming software would dislike working on a farm. But to each their own.
> No matter what you think it is that brings happiness to the general population, there will be at least someone who doesn't find happiness in it. There are always outliers.
I'm not convinced I'm that much of an outlier psychologically, though; I think only my prosperous conditions are themselves a global outlier. I believe that if you gave most people the privilege I have, of having just enough money to pursue the things they love without doing work they don't enjoy, without worrying about being able to afford food, shelter, or medical bills, they would be happy too, with or without social connections.
> Farms are where you find the intersection of all cool tech. I have to wonder how someone who enjoys creating and consuming software would dislike working on a farm.
I need to do intellectually stimulating work to be happy. Repetitive manual labour would drive me insane. My mental image of "labouring on a farm" there was also "poor economic conditions subsistence farming", not "industrial farm with a million dollars worth of cool machinery".
Here's the more important data point - Canada lost to the USA in three 2026 Winter Olympic Hockey finals. The whole country is hanging their collective heads in shame...
> On average, heavy social media use (more than five hours per day) is associated with lower wellbeing. Heavy users are significantly more likely to report higher stress and depressive symptoms, and believe they are worse off than their parents, compared with non- or moderate users.
I like this framing of social media use in the same terms as drug use. There are significant risks to this activity that so many people are ambivalent toward. Depression is not a condition you want to have, and here's this activity that causes it (or at least significantly contributes to it). And yet, so many persist!
You quote correlation and then jump to causation. Any high quality evidence for causation that make you confident it's not depression that drives SM use (or something else entirely driving both)?
It’s interesting to see a country’s internal rank of its own happiness against how I would rank them using my worldview.
Israel for example seems like a place that would be fairly unhappy right now given world events, but they rank quite highly.
Saudi Arabia also sticks out as unexpected. It seems in the media I hear about their government being quite oppressive (especially against women), so seeing them just above the US is surprising.
Another big surprise is Mexico. It seems like every day there's another gory story about a bunch of people disappearing or getting shot in a gang war. But they're the second-highest ranked in North America at #12, behind only Costa Rica.
IMO, everyone on Earth has to reconcile with their current circumstances and make the choice to go about life with a positive or negative disposition in spite of those circumstances.
It had a huge drop in positive emotions due to the war with Gaza in 2023. Actually, negative emotions were higher than positive which is sad and expected.
But the index includes many metrics that don't change rapidly like GDP, life expactancy.. so any short conflict will not have outsized effect.
In Israel they use happiness as a rebellion. You try to kill them, you say what you want, but they don’t care, they stay happy. It fuels their enemy’s rage.
As it's selfreporting and it's more about expectations than actual happiness a finnish dude only needs to think that life is just incredible compared to what he sees at the other side of the border to selfreport a 10 in happiness
I haven't travelled there but I grew up in Poland and still visit. US feels very capitalistic to me. I feel the pace is slower in Poland. In US I feel the need to produce. Might be just me.
Well, that's just inherent in the question which asks someone to imagine the best possible life vs. the worst possible life. In a society with lots of room to grow you aren't at the higher rungs. In a society with no progress possible you're at the top easily.
Speak to anyone in China and they're less happy this year because the economy is heavily depressed. This is not reflected in the chart. COVID doesn't even appear on most countries' charts despite huge impact globally. I am very skeptical of their process if it results in such questionable macro-narratives. I wonder if their interviewees are "business owners capable of answering the phone in English" or some similarly skewed dataset.
If you only followed my country's subreddit (New Zealand) you would believe we live in hell, it's the most miserable time in our nation's history and nobody has a future here. Of course this doesn't resonate at all with my own personal experience in my life. We rank 11th, unchanged year on year.
Young people with difficult housing affordability and general high cost of living is dragging down the score. Boomers that own their homes are more satisfied:
Except the biggest drop was among teenage girls. Housing affordability and cost of living isn't usually yet a concern to most teenagers, and to the extent that it is a concern, it is equally a concern to teenage boys who haven't felt the same decline in happiness.
Well, someone once tried to get happiness classified as a psychiatric disorder:
* https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1376114/ (1992)
The abstract: “ It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.”
I guess a Buddhist point of view would be that any emotion/feeling should not be held on to. (It is best to feel and let all things pass, I think, but to consider it a disorder to "hold on" to happiness doesn't seem right...I am not well-read enough about it to know if it can in fact cause suffering)
I think social media is being wrongly made in to a scapegoat
Rather, social media mis-use is a symptom of young people having a lack of things like "third spaces" to go to to socialize at, of not having meaningful work or volunteer opportunities, of lacking certain other things that may have existed in the past.
Social media offers a new engaging experiment that fills the void of some of these things that don't exist elsewhere otherwise but doesn't act as an equivalent replacement
Social media companies are actors that actively compete for the attention of young people. That does result in collapsing third spaces and social events because it’s easier/cheaper to just post on IG or hang out on discord.
The term 'social media' has changed a lot over time. The attention grabbing kind we have today is a very different beast than what we started out with; no ads and only a chronological timeline showing posts from your network.
The original kind was genuinely connecting people and adding value. The current one is in effect isolating and driving people and groups apart.
Luckily, the original kind did not vanish. I find a lot of joy hanging out on the fediverse. I spend far less time on it than what I did on Twitter of FB back when I still had accounts there, but that is a good sign.
Social media is too generous term to use when describing products from Meta, TikTok, Snap, X etc. It is an ad platform that also, occasionality, shows you what your friends are up to.
We should come up with a better term than 'social media' when describing platforms that has reached the last stage of enshitification.
I was not an athlete growing up. Didn't do much in organized sports. But all three of my kids play a team sport. It does wonders for them. I really helped them get out of the pandemic. But having them outside several hours a week, working with peers and other adults, practicing new skills. Really cool to see and I think it really helped their mental health (and by extension, my own).
Are you positing that not-young people aren’t suffering from the same?
Because of social media, there are less teenagers hanging out at the malls. Shops close down. It forms a feedback loop
Well they’re also closing down because most people buy the vast majority of their stuff online now.
FYI: This world happiness report is entirely based on asking just one obtuse question, which does not even have the word happiness in the actual question:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. 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. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
The Howtown channel had a video on this last year, 'One weird metric picks the world's "happiest country"':
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg1--c2r8HE
They link to their sources:
* https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vFO-3Sq5-rorCWBIKwuR-Spk...
Specifically the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale ("Cantril Ladder") is used:
* https://www.sciotoanalysis.com/news/2024/2/9/what-is-cantril...
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-use...
It's been around since 1965, so it's presumably been studied a lot and the pros and cons of it explored in the literature.
It looks to me that this refers to a 272 page PDF report [0] on the theme "Happiness and Social Media" and the Executive summary explains that it is about much more than that simple question.
[0] https://files.worldhappiness.report/WHR26.pdf
Pretty good question I would say. It’s rating your life on a scale of 1 to 10. That being said it doesn’t gauge actual happiness. For instance the Nordic countries have very high levels of depression with a third of the some countries being on antidepressants. As a whole I would say on a day to day basis people are much more ebullient and happy seeming in a lot of other places like the Mediterranean. I would wager that this doesn’t capture the percentage of time people are “happy”.
Its hard to frame a question across languages and cultures.
The ladder metaphor isn't the worst.
It's especially hard to express "happiness" across languages. It's a word that is hard to define and generally has no perfect synonyms between languages. It ranges broadly from "present feeling of contentment" to "ultimate feeling of fulfillment in life," and it seems like the survey is aiming for the latter aspect. Therefore the ladder analogy is a decent way to communicate that.
This isn’t gauging happiness but rather if your country is fulfilling your aspirations. I bet someone that works in a role he didn’t really want still might be very happy on a day to day basis but he never had the chance to become the doctor or botanist he always wanted to be.
An obvious issue with the metaphor that comes to mind is that if you consider yourself to have a pretty good life, to be overall happy and satisfied, but you think it's possible to have an objectively much better life, then you'd rank yourself relatively low. And vice versa, if you think your life sucks but it could be much worse you'd rank yourself relatively high.
But, that is still giving a happiness score.
If the society/culture you are living within. Is well off, but swamped with cravings that it could be better. Then you are less happy.
This study isn't trying to measure how 'materially well off you are', it is happiness. So if you are un-satisfied even with your big house, and un-happy, that still says something.
Same problem as rating your pain on the pain scale: is 10 the worst pain I've experienced, or the worst I can imagine? Because I've got a... very vivid imagination. And still, that's the best we can do. I blame an imperfect universe.
Doesn't that almost imply the happiest countries in the world have a lack of imagination on what could be better? Or maybe they don't suffer from comparison (the thief of joy) as a culture.
>a lack of imagination on what could be better
I'd argue it's likelier that people are more informed about their absolute position globally. Any screen gets you the mental image of the top of the ladder. So happy people would end up scoring themselves low, because there's a globalized vision of wealth nowadays.
Besides there's a difference in life self-evaluation and experienced happiness, so the report really is a misnomer.
Canada here. Feels like we're barely hanging on to rung 5 or 6 and about to fall to the bottom.
Quantifiable example: most recent jobs report we lost 100k+ full time jobs. Biggest job less since COVID. Or the fact our increase in GDP per capita is the (second?) worst in the OECD in the last 10 years. Worse than Japan, Italy, the UK and all the other laggards...
> Canada here. Feels like we're barely hanging on to rung 5 or 6 and about to fall to the bottom.
The Missing Middle podcast went into this in a recent episode, and it's age-dependent: older folks are happier (i.e., they have purchased homes), while younger folks are less happy (cost of living). We Canadians basically have age-dependent wealth-class nowadays.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizaUBC22o4&t=4m13s
The fact boomers have it so good yet our ranking is dropping like a rock tells you just how bad it is for the working class, especially those who don't have government jobs...
It’s the same in Australia. And they will live for another few decades most likely, so this only gets worse as far as I can tell.
While the government removes all the benefits boomers and Gen X got to use to build their wealth, ensuring the ladder is firmly pulled up behind them.
Also Canada, and I disagree pretty strongly with your post. Those two statistics have little bearing on happiness. Housing costs and healthcare access are much bigger concerns.
They are concerns, but not all that closely tied to happiness. Research shows time and time again that deep social connection is the key, if you will, to happiness.
And today's Canadians aren't that great at being social: "In 1986, about one in two Canadians saw their friends on an average day. Now, only about one in five do." — https://www.cbc.ca/radio/nowornever/maintain-friendship-conn...
> Research shows time and time again that deep social connection is the key, if you will, to happiness.
Research suggests it, but it does not show it. Psychological research is notoriously unscientific, with most studies not even being replicable because humans are extremely complex and it's basically impossible to design any kind of methodology that concretely controls for all variables, all the more so when we have things like 'ethics' that make it even harder to do controlled resaerch.
It is absolutely possible to be happy without deep social connection. I am an absolute misanthrope, I seriously hate every one of you bastards, but I'm pretty damn happy. The key to my happiness is that I live a comfortable life and have the freedom to spend it creating (and consuming) things I love - art, music, games, software. If I had to instead spend my days labouring on a farm, if I didn't have indoor plumbing and air conditioning, didn't have access to healthcare and stability and security, etc. I would be absolutely miserable. My happiness is only possible due to the great economic conditions and sensible policies of my country.
> It is absolutely possible to be happy without deep social connection.
Well, of course it is. No matter what you think it is that brings happiness to the general population, there will be at least someone who doesn't find happiness in it. There are always outliers.
> If I had to instead spend my days labouring on a farm
Farms are where you find the intersection of all cool tech. I have to wonder how someone who enjoys creating and consuming software would dislike working on a farm. But to each their own.
> No matter what you think it is that brings happiness to the general population, there will be at least someone who doesn't find happiness in it. There are always outliers.
I'm not convinced I'm that much of an outlier psychologically, though; I think only my prosperous conditions are themselves a global outlier. I believe that if you gave most people the privilege I have, of having just enough money to pursue the things they love without doing work they don't enjoy, without worrying about being able to afford food, shelter, or medical bills, they would be happy too, with or without social connections.
> Farms are where you find the intersection of all cool tech. I have to wonder how someone who enjoys creating and consuming software would dislike working on a farm.
I need to do intellectually stimulating work to be happy. Repetitive manual labour would drive me insane. My mental image of "labouring on a farm" there was also "poor economic conditions subsistence farming", not "industrial farm with a million dollars worth of cool machinery".
> healthcare access
What healthcare access? My family has had to go abroad for surgeries twice in the last 3 years because there's no access to healthcare here...
And housing prices? My sister bought a mansion in Texas for less than a condo here.
Arguably these two data points are even worse for Canada. Either way our ranking is dropping.
I'm saying that data (not anecdotes) on those would've been better justification for your ranking.
That said, for most people, going abroad for surgery or to buy a home is not an option.
Yes. GDP per capita is data and a well known proxy for quality of life.
For example, declining productivity (which is what GDP per capita is) means a worse house price/income ratio, ie. worse affordability.
Here's the more important data point - Canada lost to the USA in three 2026 Winter Olympic Hockey finals. The whole country is hanging their collective heads in shame...
> On average, heavy social media use (more than five hours per day) is associated with lower wellbeing. Heavy users are significantly more likely to report higher stress and depressive symptoms, and believe they are worse off than their parents, compared with non- or moderate users.
I like this framing of social media use in the same terms as drug use. There are significant risks to this activity that so many people are ambivalent toward. Depression is not a condition you want to have, and here's this activity that causes it (or at least significantly contributes to it). And yet, so many persist!
You quote correlation and then jump to causation. Any high quality evidence for causation that make you confident it's not depression that drives SM use (or something else entirely driving both)?
It’s interesting to see a country’s internal rank of its own happiness against how I would rank them using my worldview.
Israel for example seems like a place that would be fairly unhappy right now given world events, but they rank quite highly.
Saudi Arabia also sticks out as unexpected. It seems in the media I hear about their government being quite oppressive (especially against women), so seeing them just above the US is surprising.
Another big surprise is Mexico. It seems like every day there's another gory story about a bunch of people disappearing or getting shot in a gang war. But they're the second-highest ranked in North America at #12, behind only Costa Rica.
IMO, everyone on Earth has to reconcile with their current circumstances and make the choice to go about life with a positive or negative disposition in spite of those circumstances.
Perhaps all the Saudi men are very happy.
It had a huge drop in positive emotions due to the war with Gaza in 2023. Actually, negative emotions were higher than positive which is sad and expected. But the index includes many metrics that don't change rapidly like GDP, life expactancy.. so any short conflict will not have outsized effect.
In Israel they use happiness as a rebellion. You try to kill them, you say what you want, but they don’t care, they stay happy. It fuels their enemy’s rage.
Yes, maybe. It's the old jewish way of dealing with being powerless in exile. You try to hit us, we smile and joke. It's not healthy.
I think it's now more about gaining power as a nation and not being at the mercy of those who seek to destroy us.
[flagged]
Too bad there's no one to shield Israel's neighbors from experiencing the consequence of theirs, eh?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1ry2kwr/the_moment...
Exciting stuff!
You would think that Finland's unemployment rate (10%+) would influence its ranking, but that's not the case at all.
As it's selfreporting and it's more about expectations than actual happiness a finnish dude only needs to think that life is just incredible compared to what he sees at the other side of the border to selfreport a 10 in happiness
Could also explain Israel
Nordic countries have better safety nets.
I haven't travelled there but I grew up in Poland and still visit. US feels very capitalistic to me. I feel the pace is slower in Poland. In US I feel the need to produce. Might be just me.
Well, that's just inherent in the question which asks someone to imagine the best possible life vs. the worst possible life. In a society with lots of room to grow you aren't at the higher rungs. In a society with no progress possible you're at the top easily.
Speak to anyone in China and they're less happy this year because the economy is heavily depressed. This is not reflected in the chart. COVID doesn't even appear on most countries' charts despite huge impact globally. I am very skeptical of their process if it results in such questionable macro-narratives. I wonder if their interviewees are "business owners capable of answering the phone in English" or some similarly skewed dataset.
If you only followed my country's subreddit (New Zealand) you would believe we live in hell, it's the most miserable time in our nation's history and nobody has a future here. Of course this doesn't resonate at all with my own personal experience in my life. We rank 11th, unchanged year on year.
It's sad to see Canada drop so much, as much as Congo, Malawi and a bunch of other war torn places.
Young people with difficult housing affordability and general high cost of living is dragging down the score. Boomers that own their homes are more satisfied:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dizaUBC22o4&t=4m13s
Except the biggest drop was among teenage girls. Housing affordability and cost of living isn't usually yet a concern to most teenagers, and to the extent that it is a concern, it is equally a concern to teenage boys who haven't felt the same decline in happiness.
Endless captcha loops for me whenever I click on a chapter.
Not using any VPN or proxy, no CF DNS, nothing like that.
https://files.worldhappiness.report/WHR26.pdf