In recent years life as we know it, got turned upside down – but how people handled it had much to do with their surroundings. The ability to look on the bright side is a privilege and last year we learned how something like, where we were born, could affect our ability to do so. For example, some might say that Canada has had it pretty good – but are we the happiest country in the world?
A recent study shows that, while we had it better than the majority, the great north didn’t even crack the top 10… But we did make the top 20.
“Happiness rankings are based on life evaluations as the more stable measure of the quality of people’s lives,” they wrote ahead of their findings.
“In World Happiness Report 2022, we pay special attention, as we did in World Happiness Report 2021, to specific daily emotions (the components of positive and negative affect) to better track how COVID-19 has altered different aspects of life.”
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By considering factors such as GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, and corruption, the world happiness report concluded that Canada had the 15th best quality of life out of the 146 countries with available data.
“This marks a substantial fall for Canada, which was 5th in the first World Happiness Report,” they explain – though they credit COVID for the drop.
“COVID-19 has affected various emotions differently and partly because emotions based on yesterday’s experiences tend to be more volatile than life evaluations, which are more stable in response to temporary disturbances.”
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Finland, however, was at the top of the list for the 5th year in a row, with Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands rounding out the top 5.
For more information about how they put together this list or to see previous lists, you can read the complete report here – but be warned. These folks did not mess around. There’s a whole lot of information there, so give yourself some time to really sift through it all.
Honestly, the 15th happiest country in the entire world is not all that bad. Plus, with the worst of the pandemic over (hopefully), things are only going to get better. Happy reading!
