The day I arrived in Finland to learn how to be happy, I thought about the ladder. Humans have many ways to assess their own happiness, but the Cantril Ladder may be the most influential, even if you’ve never heard of it. It goes like this:
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 single, carefully calibrated inquiry is how the World Happiness Report—the annual, much-covered study run by academics at Oxford University, among others—ranks every country in the world on professed happiness. Around 1,000 people from each country, across a spread of representative demographics, by phone or in person, contribute to the study each year. And lately, each year, there is the same result.
In 2025, while the U.S. slid to an all-time low of 24th out of all the world’s nations in life satisfaction, Finland again reigned supreme. The nation has held the top spot for the past eight years running. Finns were happier during the peak COVID years, even, than Americans have ever been.
And why would we be happy? Things haven’t been so great, have they? You know it, I know it. In both the U.K., where I live, and in the U.S., life in recent years has not, let us say, inspired a huge amount of joie de vivre. There are a bunch of reasons for this, and I imagine you can think of 10 right now without me having to list them. The atmosphere, in many places, is decidedly sour.
That’s probably why, whenever the World Happiness Report comes out, the media around the globe pore over it. But what has changed in the past few years is that Finland has begun to try to capitalize on this accolade. In 2023 and 2024, the tourist board, Visit Finland, invited 14 non-Finns to come to the country and undertake a “Happiness Masterclass.” Helsinki’s airport is covered in signage that reads, “Welcome to your happy place.”
It’s good PR. Who doesn’t want to be happy? I had several questions, though. I lived in Sweden for two years, a country that also ranks highly on the World Happiness Report. I had an idea of why that might be, reasons like a strong history of social welfare, a sensible approach to work-life balance, and high national prosperity. But that is true of all the Nordic countries, more or less. What were the Finns doing over there that meant that, unlike Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, they were taking the top spot every single year, and by a statistically significant margin? And what were they doing that might, as Visit Finland was claiming, constitute “a skill that can be learned” by the rest of us? Was this all just marketing guff, or was it possible that a holiday in Finland could teach you how to be happy?
So I asked Finland to put its money where its mouth is. To make me happier, the Finnish way. The pros at Visit Finland gamely accepted, and off I went. Five days later, I had indeed internalized some lessons about happiness—some of which I now wish I could unlearn.
When I arrived in Finland, I reckon I’d have put myself at about a solid 7 on the famous ladder. Life’s pretty good, all things considered. But Finns’ average score was 7.736, more than a full point higher than the average in either the U.K. or the U.S. I knew I could—and must—go higher.
I left the conspicuously peaceful Helsinki airport, which is decked out in blond wood and pumps birdsong into the toilets, and met my taxi driver outside in a cold drizzle.
“Nice weather we’re having,” he said in a monotone.
On the drive into town, I asked him whether he thinks Finnish people are happy. He laughed for quite a long time. “Do your work first, then see what you think,” he said.
As we neared the hotel where I would be staying, he pointed out a digital display on the side of a building that shows a regularly updating count of the population of Finland. Finland is a small country—just over 5.5 million people live here. That is half the population of London, where I live. But the country itself is relatively big: about as big as Germany, which has 15 times as many people in it. A full 10 percent of the area of Finland is lakes, and a whopping 75 percent is forest. Even in Helsinki itself, you are never very far away from real wilderness. I ate dinner that night at a restaurant on the 15th floor of a high-rise in a busy central district, and even from that vantage, most of what you can see out in the middle distance is woodland. Although 85 percent of Finns live in an urban area, urban area is a relative term here. Nature is always a stone’s throw away, which seems as good a reason as any to feel upbeat.
Before the World Happiness Report catapulted Finland into the global spotlight, there used to be some other, less celebratory stereotypes of Finns. When I lived in Sweden, people alluded in an offhand kind of way to the belief that Finnish people were once thought of as drunk hicks. There was indeed a man fully asleep over his glass of beer at the bar I went to after dinner, but whilst I am admittedly from a nation with a deeply messed up relationship with alcohol, that doesn’t seem so unusual to me. They’ve also shed that label in recent years.
Another long-standing Finnish stereotype is still going strong, though. I got the impression from Swedish people that the general feeling is that Finns are just … kind of strange. They don’t speak much, like to be alone, and march to the beat of their own drum. As a Swedish friend rather uncharitably put it: “You know when you meet a guy who’s quiet, but you get a gut feeling he’s into some truly disgusting stuff that he would never talk about?”
At the bar that first night, I sat down with a group of friends in their 30s and asked them, too, why Finnish people were happy. Again, they all laughed.
“This is the worst question,” one said, “because I don’t think Finnish people are so happy.”
“For six months of the year it’s dark, so it doesn’t make sense,” her friend added. “And the suicide rate is very high.”
It is true that in the 1990s, Finland had some of the highest suicide rates in the world. But the number of suicides (or, as the WHR refers to them, “deaths of despair”) in Finland has been falling dramatically, and has been for some time. The dark, too, I already suspected was a red herring. When I lived in Sweden, the fact that you endure so many months of short days perversely made me happier, because when the summer months came, I was able to truly appreciate them. You walk down the street thinking things like Everyone and everything is so beautiful to a degree that surely wouldn’t be possible if the sun shone all year round. But I decided not to Finn-splain their own country to these strangers whose drinks I had interrupted, and left them to it.
The following morning, I did the first activity Visit Finland had planned in order to educate me in the ways of Finnish happiness: a sea swim and a sauna. I’m very familiar with sauna culture. Back in Sweden, my then-boyfriend was a member of our local sauna club, and I used to go with him sometimes. It was a pleasant enough thing to do, but in my heart of hearts, I never fell in love with it. I would sit in that pine-scented room feeling the sweat trickle from areas of my body I wasn’t aware could sweat and think: What is the point of this? People talked vaguely about health benefits and detoxing, but it all felt ill-defined.
Still, in pursuit of one more step on the happiness ladder, I would give it another shot. I went to a sea-pool and sauna complex right in Helsinki’s main harbor, a minute’s walk from their Supreme Court building. The Baltic Sea is, perhaps needless to say, not warm. That wasn’t stopping a healthy crowd of Finns from spending their Saturday morning getting in it. It nearly stopped me, as I watched a grown man whimpering with each step, but in the name of research I dutifully threw my body in the water and dragged it out again, pink and raw as a plucked chicken. I suppose I did feel happy to be in the sauna, surrounded by strangers in elfin little felted sauna hats and not much else, because it meant I was no longer in the sea.
Visit Finland’s happiness program also put heavy emphasis on what is supposedly a key element in a typical Finnish lifestyle: the forest. Wilderness hasn’t formed a very large part of my life, as a person born and raised in one of the biggest cities in the world. My dad likes to say that the only time he ever felt ashamed of my brother and me when we were children was when he would take us to visit some friend who lived in the countryside and we would point at mud and shriek in horror. But if I could shake off my city shackles and learn to embrace the mud, perhaps I could inch up that ladder a few decimal places. I knew that I would be staying for one night in what was billed as a remote, off-grid, sustainable cabin overlooking the Baltic, but what I did not understand is that, in Finland, all of that can be true and you can still be a mere 15-minute drive from central Helsinki.
Imogen West-Knights
A woman named Anna, sent to guide me, rapped on the door of my cabin dressed in a mint gilet, a purple rain jacket, and a pastel-pink backpack and said she would be taking me to do some foraging. As we meandered along the edges of the Baltic, weaving in and out of the forest, she told me which of the plants beneath our feet and at our fingertips were edible. The buds of a rowan tree taste like marzipan, juniper berries are peppery, and something called “ground elder” reminded me of carrots.
This, she said, was what made her happy, and makes so many of her countrymen feel the same. “It is very normal for Finns to go into nature to load up, you could say,” she said as she gathered up a handful of leaves called “frog’s stomach,” which tasted of peas. “When you walk in nature, you’re in the present moment; it’s easier to get to that happy mode.” It did feel good. There is a deep peace in picking a leaf off a tree and eating it. I would not have said I was someone who needed time in nature to be happy, but it can’t be denied that now that I was there in it, and really thinking about it, it did bring a sense of contentment.
But it wasn’t just that it was pleasant to be outside. On this walk, something clicked for me. It was nice to be doing something that had no specific purpose. What was the point in eating a leaf off a tree? There wasn’t one, particularly. It was just nice to do. In a society where it isn’t quite so drivingly necessary to prove your worth and make money to spend on supporting yourself, you’re more allowed to just eat the tree. You’re more allowed to just go for a walk, dip your body in the cold sea for a minute or two, sit in a sweaty wooden box. Everything around Finns gives them permission to do this—rather than implies that this is an unproductive use of your extremely limited, exchangeable-for-goods-and-services time.
On a walking tour of Helsinki, I got a chance to do some people-watching of these now-dressed, supposedly happy Finns. Many were tall and good-looking, many were blond, pops of pastel color were common in people’s outfits, and as it happened, many of the men were wearing extraordinarily ugly angler-type sunglasses. But you can, of course, tell very little about how happy people are by looking at them. Hotness is no measure of happiness, at least if celebrities are to be believed. Quietness is certainly a defining feature of Finns, though. Walking down Helsinki center’s yellow-terraced streets, you don’t hear raised voices. It is not uncommon to find yourself in a conversation with long periods of silence, which in London someone would be rushing to fill. My tour guide, Kathrin, a woman in her early 30s from Luxembourg who has been living here for 10 years, said that once you get used to the quiet, it’s a precious thing. “It’s OK to be an introvert in Finland,” she said as we walked past people having their coffees outside on café tables and park benches alone in the sunshine.
Imogen West-Knights
Kathrin is endearingly besotted with her adopted country and spoke about it with the reverence of a convert. Some more things I heard from her that contribute to people in Finland being happy included: sauna culture discouraging fatphobia; emphasis on design—that means even very basic, cheap things are beautiful and robust; and, of course, nature. A feeling of security also plays into it, she told me. Many Finnish people I would meet in the coming days would describe themselves as feeling “safe,” by which they didn’t just mean safe from something like street crime, which is what I would mean if I used the word. There is a long-running culture of preparedness here for … well, whatever might be coming next. Finland has one of the largest reservist armies in the world, and an underground latticework of everything-proof bunkers beneath Helsinki big enough to house 900,000 people, well over the actual population of Helsinki, in an emergency. The entire country is subjected to an air-raid siren test on the first Monday of every month at 12 p.m. They might share an enormous land border with a country currently waging an aggressive land war, but they won’t be caught unawares, which brings a peace of mind. “People have a really deep sense of understanding that they will be looked after,” Kathrin said. And there are Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson’s iconic little white creatures, the Moomins. Everyone loves the Moomins.
All of which sound like great reasons to be happy to me. So why weren’t Finnish people owning up to being happy when I asked them? I dropped in at the art gallery Amos Rex (Finland’s arts and culture funding is substantial, by the way), and asked Helena, a warm older woman who works as a guide at the gallery, why people had been laughing at my question.
“I think it’s because of the melancholy nature of us. We’re not easygoing,” she said.
Finnish people are not typically very exuberantly joyful in their affect. Puzzle solved, I thought: It’s perfectly possible to be satisfied with your life and also present yourself in a muted, introverted manner in response to a really quite personal question from a strange journalist. Helena thought it might go deeper than that, though, to some core ways in which Finnish people understand their own happiness.
“The reasons why we are the happiest people, things like very little corruption, trusting in the government and the powers that be, trusting in the police, paying high taxes but believing that the taxes are used for our benefit, for our free education and subsidized health care—all of these things, if you’re a Finn and live in Finland, you don’t necessarily realize how happy they make you. But when you go abroad and come back, then you see it. So I think the happiness is sort of surreptitious. It’s like an undercurrent in our lives.”
She mentioned, too, that it is deeply un-Finnish to boast about anything: “You don’t show wealth here, because it’s a no-no. You mustn’t show that you’re wealthy.”
Now that I thought about it, I had seen nobody in Finland so far who I would have described as dressing “flashy,” or driving a souped-up vehicle, or swinging an overtly expensive handbag. Conspicuous consumption is not the done thing.
“And it’s the same with happiness?” I asked.
“Exactly,” said Helen. “There is a poem about it, something like: ‘The one who has got happiness must hide it.’ Keep it to yourself, don’t boast about it. Don’t jinx it. But we know we’ve got it.”
She didn’t actually wink at me, but she may as well have. It’s not that Finnish people aren’t proud of the distinction of being the happiest nation. It’s that self-satisfied pride in anything is a distinctly un-Finnish thing to express.
Perhaps it’s easier for non-Finns to openly celebrate what there is to love about the country. I went to a winery called Ainoa a little way outside Lahti, a midsize Finnish city a couple of hours north of Helsinki that also happens to be home to the largest population of seagulls in the world. There, I met a couple called David and Paola, who waxed lyrical about the produce available in Finland’s cold climate (i.e., not grapes), which led them to start an award-winning berry-wine business. David and Paola have been here since 2005. He’s from Massachusetts, she’s from Ecuador, and they have raised their children here. Before the winery, David was working as an engineer for a company with operations in Finland, and he remembers getting in trouble: “I had a few times when I was actually told by my boss to take more time off.” (Employees in Finland, even high up in a company, will punch in and punch out each day.) “He said, ‘The computer can’t bank that many hours for you, so you have to cut back because you’re breaking our system.’ ”
To hear David tell it, Finnish happiness has nothing to do with how jolly they may or may not be as a people. “It has less to do with how ‘ha ha, smiling, happy’ people are, and more to do with: There’s less reason to be unhappy in Finland than any place else. You can think about all the things that can make people unhappy, and Finland has less of them,” he said. He talked about how his children are safe from gun violence, the sacredness of personal time, the knowledge that if he and Paola became sick, or couldn’t pay the mortgage, or lost their house, there would be a social safety net there to catch them. “Everyone takes care of everyone else, to some extent,” he said.
Given all this, I expected David to tell me frankly that, no, it’s not possible to “learn to be happy” like a Finnish person, because it’s about what society offers you. That’s not what he said. “It’s also about an acceptance of what you’ve got, and being grateful for it,” he told me. You absolutely could learn.
Just as the annual hoo-ha around the World Happiness Report encourages Finnish people to consciously identify good things about their lives, things that have become as background as the air they breathe, I was finding that the air I breathe at home is more polluted than I had thought. That I could, in fact, be happier. Going to Finland doesn’t so much teach you how to be happy as it does open your eyes to the various ways in which your life and the lives of most people where you come from are lacking.
Imogen West-Knights
One of the last things I was invited to do was attend a birdhouse-making workshop with the Visit Finland employees. I suppose the point of this was that it is good for the soul to make things with your hands, away from the tyranny of screens and so on. I can’t say I found it relaxing, because for some reason the building of the birdhouses was presented as a race, and so my final product looked somewhat like shit, shrapneled with nails hammered well beyond the point at which it was clear they were not going to go into the wood. But what depressed me about my birdhouse wasn’t that it was crappy, but that it implied the existence of a bucolic idyll I would be taking it home to, one that did not exist. I looked at my poorly constructed birdhouse and imagined a bruiser of a London pigeon trying to muscle its large, grimy body inside the entrance hole, which was no bigger than a watch face. And as I sat on the flight home with the birdhouse in the bin overhead, I heard the voice of that pigeon mocking me: “Who do you think you are? Where do you think you live? Coo,” etc.
Things did just seem better in Finland on every conceivable level than they were at home. I was having, by any measure, a very nice time in Finland. It is nice to stay in a hotel suite positioned right out over a lake, with its own personal sauna, as I did at a resort called Lehmonkärki in Finland’s Lakeland area. It is nice to have fresh local juice delivered to your room in Moomin-branded jugs while you lie on a bed someone else made, wearing a towelling robe and watching slop Netflix television like You. It is nice to compile your own lightly maniacal feast at a hotel breakfast buffet. These things will make you happy. But you can’t take them home with you.
My life is pretty good, as lives go. I’ve been able to stay in the same rental apartment for three years, long by London standards. I have a job I like, a partner, friends, family, relatively good health. But I am also often tense and harried by a thousand little frictions that exist at home that just … don’t, in Finland. It can feel like life in the U.K., and as I understand it in the U.S. too, is overarched by the sense that, far from existing to support you, the state is out to punish you for any tiny infraction. Want to have a child? Pay most of your salary for their care. Need medical attention? Good luck. Can’t afford a home? Live on the street.
My life assessment of 7 was under threat. I felt myself slipping down that ladder fractionally for every air mile I traveled further away from Finland and back to the U.K.
Shortly after I got home, I took a cramped and overpriced train up to Oxford, where the data scientists behind the World Happiness Report work. There, I met Jan-Emmanuel de Neve, a professor at Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College and expert in what makes life worth living. I felt I had got to the bottom of why Finnish people were happy, but now I wanted to, bluntly, know whether we were all doomed never to be as happy as our friends in the Nordics.
The World Happiness Report takes that single ladder question about life satisfaction as the basis for its rankings, but its work doesn’t stop there. Other questions asked on the Gallup World Poll feed into their final report each year, and each year they take a different theme to dive into deeply. This year, it was “sharing and caring.” One of the survey questions that caught de Neve’s eye was about how many of a person’s lunches and dinners were shared during the course of a week.
“That may sound frivolous to most people, but it’s hyperpredictive of your life satisfaction and the extent to which you have social ties, or reframed: social isolation,” he said. There’s being alone because you have no time to see anybody and have lost connection to those around you, live in a busy anonymous city, or have been sucked into living mostly online. And then there’s the solitude that Finnish people are talking about: nourishing, chosen time to yourself. And once again, here was something I hadn’t realized my life lacked. I eat the majority of my meals alone.
There are, of course, many, many reasons why countries like the U.K. and the U.S. are slipping down the happiness rankings, many of them the societal support ones that the Finns are proudly getting right. But the sharing of meals element speaks to something not often talked about in terms of life satisfaction in these countries, de Neve told me: It’s about polarization. “One of the reasons why sharing meals is so important, and why the drop, especially in the United States, is so frightening, is because it’s over these physical face-to-face interactions that we test our views of the world,” he said. “By chatting, we moderate our views. The drop in community and coming together face to face is partially underpinning the fact that we’re no longer moderating our views.”
I asked him whether there was any hope for us. Could we learn to be happy like the Finns, or is this a doomed enterprise? “I think that the bigger changes in well-being are to be had from the structural elements, is the honest truth,” he admitted.
But I didn’t want to admit defeat. It felt ungrateful to abandon the lessons in Finnish happiness wholesale. I wanted to take home what little I could. And there were things I could put in a suitcase. One of the items I bought in the Moomin gift shop was a felting kit for making a Moomin out of wool, because it was heavily discounted and I, un-Finnishly, love buying stuff I don’t need. One evening, I sat down with the kit. I don’t know if you’ve ever needle felted anything before, but it takes ages. You poke a serrated needle in and out of wool tufts hundreds and hundreds of times until they compress into the shape you’re aiming at. I had budgeted maybe an hour to do this bit of crafting, and it was clearly going to take more like seven. And at first, I was annoyed. Then I felt ridiculous. Time efficiency was not the purpose of making a felt Moomin. It was something to be done purely for the enjoyment of doing it. Yes, I had a lot of other things to do. But to my surprise, my “inner Finn” spoke: This is worth doing for no other reason than that it is nice to do. So do it.
For lack of anywhere else to put it, I set my birdhouse up on the balcony. A few days later, I was sitting out there when a tiny bird, maybe a European robin, appeared. I have no idea whether the bird was using the birdhouse, but I hadn’t known robins lived where I do. And I really looked at that little bird, listened to its chirping, let my eyes follow it to the particular section of the foliage of the tree that stands behind my flat, which it kept flitting back to.
I will never be Finnish, nor, in all likelihood, live in Finland. I can’t step out of my front door and languidly pluck leaves off trees as I drink in the peace of a silent forest. But I can pay attention to what I do have around me. The tree behind my flat has been there all along. The birds too.