By Earl Bousquet

The annual exercise measures happiness everywhere with the same yardstick: asking people in each country to measure their levels of happiness from 1 to 10 or from 10% to 100%.

Called The World Happiness Report, it involves ‘happiness researchers’ who identify key factors that generally make people happier, among them: Social Support, Income, Health, Freedom and Perceptions of Corruption.

The surveys covered 147 countries, with Finland rank first and Afghanistan last.

Finland has won for an 8th consecutive year since the survey started in 2012, alongside its Nordic neighbors, which ranked in the top 10 -Denmark in second place, Iceland third, Sweden fourth and Norway seventh.

But one of the most-reported facts is that the US has fallen to its lowest happiness ranking ever, placing 24th out of 147 member-states of the UN -its lowest since 2012, when it ranked 11th, just one outside of the Top Ten.

This year, Germany overtook the US, improving from 24th in 2024 to 22nd. The Fins (people of Finland) interviewed gave their happiness an average score of 7.7 (out of 10).

But two South and Central American nations washed by the Caribbean Sea also made it into the Top Ten list of the world’s Happiest People: Costa Rica placed 6th and Mexico placed 10th.

Regarding the USA’s low standing, the World Happiness researchers said they found the growing number of people across America eating alone is one reason for the decline in well-being in the United States. They reported that in 2023, “About one in four Americans reported eating all their meals alone the previous day.”

They added that: «The number of people dining alone in the United States has increased by 53% over the past two decades,» noting too, that “sharing meals is strongly linked with well-being.»

The world happiness researchers also found the USA is one of the few countries to see an increase in so-called «Deaths of Despair» (people dying from Suicide or Substance Abuse), at a time when such deaths are declining in most countries. The latest report surveyed people worldwide in 2022-2024 -before US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January.

Therefore, the lowering of America’s standard of happiness between 2022 and 2024, reported in March 2025, actually occurred under the Biden administration.

No Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member-state made it to the Top 20 happiest out of 147 nations, but it wouldn’t be unsafe to suggest that Caribbean people use more and different yardsticks to measure happiness.

Measuring happiness is not about accurate even when using a standard global formula, as the results would always differ -by miles- between North and South.

National yardsticks can also be used, but ultimately, the individual’s measurements of his or her personal happiness is also rooted in their relationships to their communities, influenced by societal factors mainly driven by emotions and perceptions.

Citizens everywhere -including in the USA and across CARICOM- tend to depend on being made happy by the government of the day, voters measuring their happiness by how-much they can benefit directly from the administration’s policies and projects, between elections.

On the other hand, many Fins say they get great happiness from a long legacy of unrestrained determination to successfully pursue any goal set to make themselves happy, irrespective of the government.

European yardsticks for happiness are incomparable with developing nations. The seven richest nations on earth -the G7- are Northern nations that traditionally control world trade and finance and decide how the world will always turns in their favor.

Ours has become a world where the very-few live good, better and best, while the majority simply can’t afford to live; a world where 99% of the private wealth is held by less than one percent, while lives in poor, developing and small island states in the South remain entirely dependent on unequal and unfair trade practices by the North.

In so-called mature and enlightened democracies, definition of happiness is therefore subjective, individual measurements not always having to do with how societies are asked or told to measure their collective happiness.

Every human being aims to live and die happy, but making oneself happy hardly lasts for an entire lifetime.

Caribbean people will largely define their happiness as more than ‘eating at the same table with others’, or vice versa -defining ‘eating alone’ as a measurement of unhappiness.

People eat alone by choice, according to occasion or location -and today many prefer to eat alone to scroll their cell-phones and devices undisturbed.

Not that Caribbean people don’t care about ‘Social Support, Income, Health, Freedom and Perceptions of Corruption’, but they simply define happiness differently -and not by whether they eat together or alone, in an age where others see nothing wrong, but everything smart with something called ‘Living Together Apart’.

Fact is: there’s no happiness for families eating together in poor and developing nations in the South, subject to dying from hunger or disease if aid pipelines from the North are shut, or if their income-earning relatives in the US are rounded-up and deported.

Caribbean people cannot be happy when the US is moving to punish their governments for wanting to ensure they continue to receive essential free medical care from Cuban doctors and nurses.

Americans will also continue to feel less-happy for as long as their government’s policies continue to reduce how-much and how-often they can afford to eat today.

Fact is: The world is no longer the happy place it used to be when Louis Armstrong sang ‘What a Wonderful World!’ and Americans are no longer as happy as they used to be, because, like people everywhere, they too are seeing elements of happiness simply disappear.

Even people’s perceptions of happiness have changes -and that remains a very unhappy reality!