101 YEARS OLD AND STILL AS HAPPY AS A FINN...
ACCORDING to the United Nations 2018 World Happiness Report, Finland is the happiest country on Earth. I freely admit that I have never been to Finland but most of the Finns I have met have been on the morose side, leading me to suspect that there is something wrong with the UN’s methodology.
Their listing of 156 countries, I discovered, is based on self-reported details of such things as earnings, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and absence of corruption. I would submit however that such matters are only part of the story of true happiness.
Ambrose Bierce came close to a proper definition of happiness in his Devil’s Dictionary, written around 1906. Happiness, he said, is “An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.” He would, no doubt, explain the latest UN Happiness table by pointing out how miserable the average Finn finds his neighbours, and that they find him miserable too.
My own view of happiness is slightly more complex. Happiness, I have always maintained, occurs when experience surpasses expectation. The key to happiness therefore is to have low expectations. The Finns have high taxes, very cold winters, an impossibly complex language (in which nouns may be declined through 15 cases) and a National Sleepy Head Day on July 27 on which the last member of a family to wake up is thrown into the sea or one of Finland’s 187,888 lakes.
With all this to worry about it is no wonder that expectations are low and are so easy to surpass. The high rates of depression recorded in Finland also support this analysis. With Norway, Denmark and Iceland occupying the next three places after Finland in the Happiness League, there is clearly something about the bleak sunless north that makes people happy.
Britain, according to the UN report, comes only 19th in the Happiness table, despite the fact that we can be just as grumpy as the Finns if we put our minds to it, even though our taxes are moderate, our winters are mild, our grammar is very simple (even if most people continue making mistakes) and we don’t make a point of regularly throwing people into lakes.
The trouble is that we don’t let our grumpiness lower our expectations. It is a stoic, British grumpiness of which we have every right to be proud.
We know that autumn leaves and winter snow and Sundays always take our railway companies by complete surprise, yet we continue to expect the trains to run on time and we grumble cheerfully when they don’t. We are happy to be miserable but do not allow it to depress our expectations.
Having high expectations is essential for high achievement but is also liable to result in lower happiness when we do not attain our goals. But we do not let that deter us. Even when we keep missing, we continue to aim for the stars.
What the UN really needs is a Happy To Be Miserable league table. Then I think the British could run the Finns and the other Scandinavians very close for the top spot.