The report from the world’s happiest country draws attention to the well-being of young people

The report from the world’s happiest country draws attention to the well-being of young people

By Claire Cameron edited by Clara Moskowitz

The world’s happiest countries tend to be Nordic and healthy and have a higher degree of freedom and less inequality. Nevertheless, young people in certain regions may experience a decline in well-being. That’s the big takeaway in 2026 World Happiness Report, an annual barometer of global well-being from the University of Oxford, in partnership with Gallup and other organisations.

Finland is the world’s happiest country, according to the report, with Iceland, Denmark, Costa Rica and Sweden rounding out the top five. The report defines well-being as a combination of life evaluations, positive emotions and negative emotions and measures it through surveys, while the happiness ranking is constructed using only life evaluations.

The report emphasized the role of social media use in happiness: young people living in 43 countries who ranked high on a measure of problematic social media use tended to have lower well-being scores. Importantly, the report cannot conclude that social media use leads to a decline in well-being, and experts say the effects on young people are complex. For example, other research suggests that higher levels of social media use can increase empathy in some children.

The report also found that negative feelings have declined over time among most young people, with some notable regional exceptions. “In North America and Western Europe, young people are much less happy than they were 15 years ago,” the report authors stated. But overall, the global findings are consistent with other research that has shown that young people today have shown many positive trends, including a tendency to be more empathetic, less narcissistic, more inclusive and even more patient than previous generations.

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The report’s happiness rankings are based on the responses of Gallup World Poll respondents to this question: “Please imagine a ladder with rungs 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 rung of this ladder would you feel at this time?”

Of course, happiness and well-being are more subjective and nuanced than these rankings might show. The Gallup World Poll surveys people in more than 140 countries and includes both in-person and telephone interviews, usually conducted with at least 1,000 people per country. The findings therefore provide a snapshot of global well-being, but cannot show why individuals living in a given country report a higher level of well-being than those in another.

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