100% Happiness. Satisfaction guaranteed, or you’ll be forcibly injected with tge happiness drug 🫠
(I just thought of antidepressants = happiness drug and this random thought popped up lmao)
Yeah, Kensington PA is famously a paradise.
There’s been no war here and no terraforming event. The environment is stable. It’s the Pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There’s 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die.
Shiny
I knew I recognised this but I needed your comment to place it.
Making a new country is much harder than that. You have to get a plurality of existing countries to say you’re a country before you can join the club. See also: Taiwan.
How do you know Finland isn’t already doing that?
Imagine if antidepressants = happinesses. Lol
Read their name again dude. They don’t give you anything, they prevent shit.
yep, and sometimes they give a lil something too. it’s sort of like picking which depression symptoms you want to deal with. you got symptoms XYZ and hate them, but wouldn’t mind symptoms ABC? try this drug, swap symptoms! eg no appetite, use the drug that makes you eat nonstop. insomnia because life sucks, use the sedating one.
I’m pretty sure this is several sci-fi novels
That’s not what they mean by “happiness” when they say Finland is the happiest country in the world. It’s more about overall life satisfaction and I can assure you that this isn’t achieveable by drugs alone.
It’s an interesting approach to studying something as hard to define as happiness, but it does make sense to me. Their own explanation:
How is your ranking calculated?
Our happiness ranking is based on a single life evaluation question called the Cantril Ladder:
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?
This question is both democratic and universal. Rather than constructing an index from multiple metrics, the Cantril Ladder empowers people to make their own judgements about what matters most, regardless of their culture and background.
The question does not mention concepts like happiness, wellbeing, or satisfaction, so it can be easily translated and understood in many different languages.
I’ll never be above 8 or below 2.
No matter how bad it could get, there could always “but also there’s snakes on the loose”
Damn, this question is kind of a mind fuck. I could spend a long time thinking about my answer.
Ya, I mean I would definitely be “laying on the floor curled in a fetal position”, but am wailing or sobbing quietly?
I would start with thinking in rougher terms (bad, okay, pretty good, great) and then narrowing it down to a specific number. Overall it is about what you feel so go with your gut.
It’s a good question imo to at least see how content people are
We had to force it on the grumpy old men, but they are happily sedated now.
we happy few has entered the chat
The hard part would be finding a place to make your country that would be legally recognised as not part of another country’s territory. Maybe construct an artificial island in the ocean, or a floating island made of essentially large boats, or settle in Antarctica and hope when the treaty goes up for renewal you can get recognised?
Apparently antidepressants don’t make you happy. They just make you feel nothing instead of depressed.
Please, do not repeat this, because it’s terrible advice that causes people that otherwise could benefit greatly from antidepressants to avoid them completely. Don’t spread misinformation.
It’s true that antidepressants don’t make you happy, but they don’t categorically make you feel nothing. Every person works differently, and a drug that for some regulates emotion and prevents stress in others suppresses emotional extremes completely. For me, Lexapro made me feel nothing. For my mother, it made her feel normal again. I have a combination of drugs that make me feel normal, but for my wife, might make her feel awful. Antidepressants don’t “make you feel nothing.” Some might have that effect, but it’s the job of a psychiatrist to find the right blend for each person. It took a few tries to find mine. If your antidepressants make you feel nothing, you need different antidepressants.
I don’t think the people who do the happiness statistic could see past the “forcibly inject” part.
Its called the Geneva Suggestions.
Only the first one is forced.
After that, you’re begging for it.
just like heroin! first ones free, after that it’s all you can do to feel normal again
Isnt that the plot to we happy few and being high is not the same as happiness.
They didn’t really ask us about our happiness, but rather just analyzed a bunch of facts. It looks like dor them “the ability leas a safe family life” is what is most important for happiness.
But if you.don’t have a family, this place is worse than, well, almost anything in Europe.
They didn’t really ask us about our happiness, but rather just analyzed a bunch of facts
Incorrect. World Happiness Report uses a poll question (conducted by Gallup) as the sole basis for the ranking.
The other stuff isn’t used for making the ranking but rather:
The six metrics are used to explain the estimated extent to which each of these factors contribute to increasing life satisfaction when compared to the hypothetical nation of Dystopia, but they themselves do not have an effect on the total score reported for each country.
Okay, thanks for the correction. Then it’s a bit funny the result has ended up the way it is.
Probably the reason is then that we are taught not to complain about what we get. If you are asked whether you are happy with how things are not, you are supposed to assume that things are already done as well as reasonably possible and, therefore, as well as they can reasonably be. Therefore, you are happy with things. Of course, you might be exceptionally depressed, but you will still be happy about your how your country is run, because you know it’s, by defintion, run as well as it can be.
But, maybe I’m still wrong. I now tried finding that one question in their report, but couldn’t find it in a reasonable time. What has the question been?
This is from the FAQ:
How is your ranking calculated?
Our happiness ranking is based on a single life evaluation question called the Cantril Ladder:
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?
This question is both democratic and universal. Rather than constructing an index from multiple metrics, the Cantril Ladder empowers people to make their own judgements about what matters most, regardless of their culture and background.
The question does not mention concepts like happiness, wellbeing, or satisfaction, so it can be easily translated and understood in many different languages.
So the question is mostly about contentment with life. I think the answer to why we rank so well is both that we live in a pretty good country comparatively and we are content with fairly little.
A depressed Finn would probably say that “this is the best possible life for me under these circumstances I live within.”
Or, I could phrase the thought this way: “Things are shit, but no can do, so this is the best possible situation currently available for me.”
I’d say a depressed person would think that life could be better and that they’re not high up on the ladder, even though they don’t feel like they can get up to the higher rungs.
In either case I would say that’s the same for depressed people elsewhere too, so it wouldn’t affect the ranking.
“Älä valita!” and “Ei pidä turhasta valittaa!” are things you hear a lot more in Finland than in other European countries. In English those would be “Don’t complain” and “Don’t complain if there’s no good reason!”
At least when living in Germany, Ukraine, Spain and the Russia, I heard a lot less of that kind of stuff than what I had gotten used to in Finland. And people also seemed more happy in their everyday lives than what was familiar to me from Finland.
You’ve probably also seen the advertisements by the Helsinki public transportation authority, HSL, telling how we have the best-functioning public transportation in Europe, based on locals in Helsinki giving better ratings for their public transportation than locals in other European cities do. And yet, most of the HSL network is based on bus lines, with only 1½ metro lines and three metro-like local train lines. Anybody who’s been to other European capitals knows that our public transportation is indeed good, but other cities have it a lot better.
If you have 43 units of serotonin per 1 unit of volume in your blood, you’ll say you’re on rung 8 on the ladder of happiness if you’re a Finn, but with the same amount of serotonin in your blood you’ll say you’re on rung 6 or 7 of that same ladder if you’re, say, German. This causes us to score very well in any poll where they ask “how okay are you with how things are going around you?”
I think it’s a very Finnish reaction to try and complain and find faults in any positive news about Finland hah
Take away the booze and I wonder how and where these rates would tank, lol. The material comfort is definitely nice, and a good chunk of happy living though.
