For eight years running, Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world by a peculiar United Nations-backed project called the World Happiness Report, started in 2012. Soon after Finland shot to the top of the list, its government set up a “happiness tourism” initiative, which now offers itineraries highlighting the cultural elements that ostensibly contribute to its status: foraging, fresh air, trees, lakes, sustainably produced meals and, perhaps above all else, saunas.Instead of adhering to one of these optimal itineraries or visiting Finland at the rosiest time of year (any time except the dead of winter), Molly Young arrived with few plans at all during one of the bleakest months. Would the happiest country on earth still be so mirthful at its gloomiest? Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Why is Finland considered the happiest country on Earth?
Hi, my name is Molly Young. I'm a book critic at The New York Times. Since 2012, the UN-backed World Happiness Report has put out an annual ranking of countries. For the past eight years, Finland has been at the top of the leaderboard, sitting at number one. In fact, Nordic countries dominate all the top spots, which makes Finland's victory streak even more remarkable. The U.S.
came in at number 24 in the most recent report released in March of this year, ranking just below the U.K. I'd already been to Iceland, number three, and Costa Rica, number six, as well as a few of the other countries that beat out the U.S. on this year's ranking.
And when I found out that the New York Times magazine was going to put out an issue devoted to happiness, I pitched going to Finland to see how the Finns define happiness and, of course, how they achieve it. But I wanted to test Finland in the dead of winter at what I presume to be its lowest point. I would test Finland on hard mode. So here's my article, read by Julia Whalen.
Our audio producer today is Tali Abakasis, and the music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. Thanks for listening.
Chapter 2: How does Finland's 'happiness tourism' initiative work?
Coming to Helsinki in February is an objectively weird choice, said a man named Mikko Tironen. During this time, we don't have, he paused, colors. I was sitting in a coffee shop with Tironen, a web developer and writer, after flying to Helsinki to think about happiness.
Chapter 3: What are the challenges of visiting Finland in winter?
For eight years running, Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world by a peculiar United Nations-backed project called the World Happiness Report, started in 2012. Soon after Finland shot to the top of the list, its government set up a Happiness Tourism Initiative, which now offers itineraries highlighting the cultural elements that ostensibly contribute to its status.
Foraging, fresh air, trees, lakes, sustainably produced meals, and perhaps above all else, saunas. Instead of adhering to one of these optimal itineraries or visiting Finland at the rosiest time of year, any time except the dead of winter, I'd come to Tyrnyn's bafflement with few plans at all during one of the bleakest months.
Would the happiest country on earth still be so mirthful at its gloomiest? When I explained this, Tirunen recalled a quote by the Finnish author Joka Vikela that goes, Finland is a land where children play in darkness. The quote was both a metaphor and a descriptive statement, he suggested. Because of the country's global coordinates, Finnish kids do indeed play in the dark a lot.
To avoid being struck by vehicles, they clip decorative reflectors called hayastine to their coats. The reflectors come in all shapes. Lemon, poodle, swan, hedgehog, soccer ball. Adults wear them too. I joke that going outside without my reflector is a way of inviting suicide, Tirunen said. If it happens, it happens. We were both drinking from small coffee cups, which are prevalent in Finland.
Anyone wanting more than a thimble full of coffee had to pursue refills relentlessly. Tirunen took a sip, emptying his cup. My partner does not like this joke. My own happiness experiment was off to a poor start. I arrived the day before, a Sunday afternoon, in a capsule of germs, a packed plane vibrating with the sounds of coughing and phlegm management. Monday dawned in sickness and jet lag.
I dressed and left my icy little hotel room, stopping at a chain store called Normal, completely normal goods at fixed low prices for a bag of the region's signature treat, salty licorice. Helsinki wore a hat of fog. You could see roughly 30 feet in the air before all was concealed behind a pearly scrim.
After coffee with Tironen, I went for an evening walk to the harbor, where black slicks of water twinkled between frozen floes. The stands that sold salmon soup and hot dogs during the day were closed. It was frosty and sparse. Families walked together and ate in dimly lit restaurants. Helsinki's famous esplanade was empty.
In spring, the central walkway becomes a riot of flowering crabapples and bear shoulders, I had been told, but now the kiosks were shuttered, the trees skeletal, the paths plowed but untrodden. I stopped at a bar for a drink and felt worse after finishing it, as I knew I would, given alcohol's peerless capacity to italicize whatever mood the drinker is already in.
On the way back to the hotel, I thought about something Tironen mentioned earlier. Outside his apartment, he said, there stood a hideous mound of dirty snow streaked in mud and gravel. He and his partner had joked about sending me a photograph of the mound as a pre-souvenir, a sardonic welcome to Finland. There are obvious problems with measuring happiness.
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Chapter 4: How is happiness measured in the World Happiness Report?
The diagram clarifies that zero is not actually a step, but refers to the space beneath the lowest rung. Cantrell also indicates that interviewers ought to move a finger rapidly up and down the ladder while posing the question.
Every year, representatives from Gallup contact approximately 1,000 people per country, either by phone or face-to-face, and ask them to identify their location on the ladder. The authors of the World Happiness Report then take those answers and combine them with the answers from the previous two years for a sample size of around 3,000 people.
Nordic countries consistently dominate the top of the list. Finland has its well-publicized eight-year streak of happiness supremacy. Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Norway are reliably in the top ten. The most miserable countries tend, not surprisingly, to be those stricken with poverty, conflict, corruption, and human rights violations.
Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Haiti... Between these two poles, you can see the shifting fates of nations. Poland and Portugal, for example, have each ascended nearly one full ladder rung since the survey began. The United States peaked at number 11 in the year 2012 and has tumbled since then. In mid-March, the 2025 World Happiness Report was released.
It was the longest one to date, a 260-page PDF bursting with data. The United States had dropped one spot since the previous year to 24th place. Finland sustained its winning streak. The report was pounced upon with various levels of rigor by media outlets, including this one. The most surprising parts of the report slipped beneath notice.
Would you have guessed, for example, that Italy, number 40, is apparently less happy than El Salvador, number 37? Or that Saudi Arabia, number 32, is happier than France, number 33? Or that Israel is in the top 10? Or that Bhutan, the country whose own Gross National Happiness Index gave rise to the report, has been absent from the list since 2019, when it limped in at number 95?
And then there are the raw figures. Each country is ranked according to a score derived from the Cantrell ladder responses. Finland's current score is 7.736, while the United States measures 6.724, about a ladder rung lower. If you look at it another way, Americans are 87% as happy as Finns. That's not bad.
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Chapter 5: Why do Nordic countries consistently rank high in happiness?
What seems to bother American readers about the report is that it's a game we're not winning. Indeed, it's a game we're losing to our closest neighbors, Mexico, number 10, and Canada, number 18. Year after year, the PDFs track our downward trajectory past Lithuania and Slovenia and the United Arab Emirates.
If Americans are exceptional in our approach to happiness, it may have to do with an insistence on treating the matter as a glittering mystery, a thing requiring pilgrimage or a course at Harvard or Yale. Both schools have offered happiness classes to understand.
It's a quandary we're tasked with solving, as with many quandaries in this country like taxes and health insurance and self-defense, on our own. In a land of maximal freedom, where the coffee cups are huge, we can just as easily imagine ourselves becoming billionaires or dying on a street corner. The span of the latter is as wide as our imaginations allow.
All government buildings in Finland have a sauna on-site. Nationwide, there is more than one sauna for every two Finns. For obvious reasons, the sauna is somewhat over-indexed in happiness tourism literature. There is a specific phrase for the blissful drowsiness associated with time spent in a heated box, and a specific elf, thought to live between a sauna's wall and heating apparatus.
The elf becomes angry if a sauna door is slammed. On my second day, I visited a place called Lola. It was my first and least representative sauna, in that it requires visitors to wear a swimsuit, irregular, costs 26 euros, expensive, and is an architectural marvel. A building that resembles a heap of rocks, with weathered pine planks arranged in faceted planes and concluding in a jagged terrace."
From the terrace, it was possible to walk down a set of stairs to the sea, where someone had carved a mushy circular hole through the top layer of ice, allowing visitors to dip in the frigid water. Avanto Oni is the word for this tradition, as I had learned from Finnish influencers on YouTube. I watched the sea dippers from inside and outside the sauna, knowing what lay ahead of me.
It was necessary to submerge. If I did not, the next two hours would be ruined by wondering whether or not I was capable of it. The evening air was 32 degrees Fahrenheit. What was the temperature of the sea? I don't know, but aside from the sauna-dug glory hole, it plateaued as solid ice into the near distance.
Some people leaped from the stairs without hesitation and abided for 20 or 30 seconds, giggling and gasping and treading water. Others lowered themselves from a ladder, wincing all the way. Padding down the stairs, I manually shut off my brain and jumped. There was a bitter taste in my mouth, as though I'd been struck by lightning, followed by a sense that my cells were being rearranged.
A sauna-goer down the deck clapped. The lone note of approval inflated me with enough pride that I floated a few seconds before climbing back up the ladder. Upon ascending the stairs, I passed a man edging his way down, and we grinned at each other, one person emerging from pointless triumph, one on his way there.
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Chapter 6: What role do saunas play in Finnish culture and happiness?
Avanta Oni, or some version of it, has become de rigueur among fitness enthusiasts and fans of the vitalist lifestyle, though the cold plunging in the United States is typically done solo, in a garage, possibly while you film yourself. What we lack is a sauna culture, or perhaps any culture that unites us so fully.
An artist I met earlier told me that her family's summer cottage had no hot water and no shower, but it did have a sauna. Everybody has sauna, yeah. Another Finn, an official at the tourism bureau, said that she herself wasn't a heavy sauna goer, only two times a week, but that if you don't have your own sauna, you will for sure have one in your building.
A taxi driver named Karam told me that he had a private sauna in his apartment, but that I use it only if I'm tired or sore. So every day, ha ha. In Finland, sauna is not a means to an end. It will not make a person richer or more attractive or more focused. The point is not to sweat out toxins, though that may occur. I'm not a scientist. The point seems to be the act itself.
Sitting in nude serenity among family, friends, and strangers, safe in the bone-deep sense of trust that such an idol both requires and reinforces. The first World Happiness Report, summarizing the state of its research, drew a distinction between two concepts, affective happiness and evaluative happiness.
Affective happiness captures emotions, immediate responses to events, whether we are experiencing joy or sadness at one moment or another. evaluative happiness is a more contemplative or systemic matter, mapping a person's overall appraisal of life and whether they are satisfied with theirs. Affective happiness is the realm of laughter, fun, picnics, parties, sex.
Evaluative happiness is tied to good health, sufficient income, social cohesion, safety. A crude synonym for evaluative happiness, and so much of this research flounders on the crudeness of synonyms, would be contentment.
That is what the Cantro ladder measures, and it should surprise no one that the Nordic countries, with their long life expectancies, highly redistributive tax regimens, functional governance, low corruption, and shared norms, land at the top of the charts. The type of happiness that tourists go to Finland to find isn't even the sort of happiness the country is accused of possessing.
A second area of confusion is that the two concepts of happiness, effective and evaluative, can operate independent of each other. A woman in the midst of extruding a baby might suffer from labor pains, low affective happiness, but feel profoundly satisfied or purposeful, high evaluative happiness.
The happiest country in the world label seems to imprint on the American mind as a never-ending carousel of delights, but in Finland's February chill, the reality is more modest. One morning, I boarded a trolley and closed my eyes, partly in sleepiness and partly to listen. Finnish belongs to the Finno-Ugric family, to which Hungarian and Estonian also belong. It has an undulant sound.
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