World Happiness Report 2026

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 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

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?

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.

> 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!

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.

You would think that Finland's unemployment rate (10%+) would influence its ranking, but that's not the case at all.

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.

Endless captcha loops for me whenever I click on a chapter.

Not using any VPN or proxy, no CF DNS, nothing like that.