“Coming to Helsinki in February is an objectively weird choice,” said a man named Mikko Tirronen. “During this time, we don’t have …” he paused. “… colors.”
I was sitting in a coffee shop with Tirronen, a web developer and writer, after flying to Helsinki to think about happiness. 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 Tirronen’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, Tirronen recalled a quote by the Finnish author Jukka Viikilä 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 heijastin, 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,” Tirronen said. “If it happens, it happens.” We were both drinking from small coffee cups, which are prevalent in Finland. Anyone wanting more than a thimbleful of coffee had to pursue refills relentlessly. Tirronen 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 Tirronen, 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 crab apples and bare 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 Tirronen 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. Despite thousands of years of inquiry, nobody (from Confucius to Aristotle to Jeremy Bentham to Richard Easterlin to Oprah Winfrey) can agree on what happiness is: Is it a quantum of pleasure? The absence of pain? A perception of purpose, hope, community? How does it relate to health or wealth or income? Is happiness a mood? A neurotransmitter?
The first World Happiness Report was a 170-page PDF with a chart that ranked countries by happiness. Denmark came in first, Finland second, Norway third. The United States was No. 11. Since then, a new scorecard has been issued nearly every year. The rankings are based on a single question from which a huge amount — an insane amount — is extrapolated. The question is called the Cantril Ladder. Here it is:
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?
If, like me, your instinct upon reading the above is to draw a ladder and number the rungs as suggested, you will end up with an 11-rung ladder, which is confusing. The originator of the Cantril Ladder, a psychologist named Dr. Hadley Cantril, included a diagram of the ladder when he proposed the device in 1965. The diagram clarifies that “zero” is not actually a step but refers to the space beneath the lowest rung. Cantril 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 10. 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 No. 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 (No. 40) is apparently less happy than El Salvador (No. 37)? Or that Saudi Arabia (No. 32) is happier than France (No. 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 No. 95?
And then there are the raw figures. Each country is ranked according to a score derived from the Cantril 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 percent as happy as Finns. That’s not bad. 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 (No. 10) and Canada (No. 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 ladder 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 overindexed in “happiness tourism” literature. There is a specific phrase for the blissful drowsiness associated with time spent in a heated box (saunanjälkeinen raukeus) and a specific elf (Saunatonttu) 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 Löyly, pronounced LOW-luh. 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. Avantouinti 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. I watched the man dunk and gave a clap in turn, then hurried back indoors to the hot sauna, which made my skin feel as though it were outlined in a neon pen. There’s a line in Martin Amis’s novel “London Fields” where the narrator reflects that “we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.” So too in a frozen sea. But warmed to the core in the sauna, you relax and have piercing thoughts such as “How wonderful it is to be hot, then cold, then hot, then cold.”
The day after Löyly I visited a more typical sauna called Kotiharjun, which had a neon red sign and two plastic chairs out front, one of them empty and the other occupied by a melancholy-seeming man in a towel. The man gleamed in silence, emitting heat. Through the door was a cramped vestibule with a communal freezer for guests to store beer. An employee collected the entry fee (16 euros) and pointed up a creaky staircase that led to the women’s locker room, which a friend had described to me as a “scene.”
It was, if quietly: a dozen women recently or imminently cleansed talked softly and retrieved items from wooden lockers beside windows with sheer burgundy curtains. There were tables and board games and a fake orchid and copies of a magazine called Sauna, and industrial-size tubs of hand sanitizer. Kotiharjun had an air of utility, like a carwash or dry-cleaning service, and a faded charm. The only sign of touristic infiltration was a “Sauna etiquette” plaque mounted on the locker-room wall, outlining the basics: Bathe before entering, stay hydrated, don’t wear perfume, don’t have loud conversations, don’t compete to see who can stay in the sauna longest, feel free to whisk yourself and others with bundles of leafy twigs.
No other foreigners were visible in the locker room, yet everyone who knew I was going to Finland had urged me to visit Kotiharjun. With its beer freezer and neon sign, the sauna sat on a knife’s edge between authentic and “authentic.” The territory between these points of awareness and overexposure is infamously narrow, and Kotiharjun seemed to have been granted long-term residency in that slender DMZ.
Unlike many Finnish treasures (heijastin, cloudberry juice), the sauna is well known beyond its borders. America has fans, including famous ones like Joe Rogan, LeBron James and Lady Gaga. Avantouinti, 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 saunagoer — “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 taksi 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 idyll 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 Cantril 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, affective 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. On the trolley I thought of ocean waves cresting and crystalline droplets wending down stalactites. This interpretation may have been flavored by the nation’s abundance of water features — lakes, rivers, sea — or perhaps the language itself had somehow been flavored by the water features. Or the association might have owed to Finnish intonation patterns, which cascade from high to low pitch over the course of a sentence. Because the stress is always on a word’s first syllable, the language also has a cozy regularity, like a horse clopping down a road.
I got off at the city center and walked to Helsinki’s main library, which looks like a ship made of carrot cake. It is called Oodi. The name was selected from 2,600 entries in a competition held a couple years before the library opened in 2018. The jury sought a library name that was short, easy to pronounce and not dedicated to a single person. Oodi is Finnish for “ode.”
A visitor enters through the prow of the enormous carrot-cake ship and is prompted to remove her ice cleats, if she is wearing them. It was thronged but quiet on the morning I arrived, and the disorienting combination of visual traffic with hushedness made me feel as though I were wearing noise-canceling headphones.
“Hei,” an employee said in greeting.
“Hei,” I said. “What is the cost of a ticket?”
“What?”
“Shall I buy a ticket to enter?”
“Ha-ha-ha,” the employee said. “No. We don’t have tickets.”
Ha-ha. No ticket, of course. One does not need a ticket to enter a public library. The fanciness of the building had tripped some reflex to sacrifice cash, which itself caused an inner ripple of gloom.
On the ground floor of the library was a cinema, a cafeteria serving beet lasagna and carrot soup and 22 children playing games of chess at window-side tables. I escalatored to the second floor, which featured a 3-D printing station, a laser cutter, a large-format printer, an engraving machine, conference rooms for anyone to use and rocking chairs in which to sit and read. There were electric and acoustic guitars — nice ones — to borrow, as well as a drum kit and multiple zithers. A podcast studio, an electronic-music studio, classrooms. A kitchen space that could be reserved for cooking with friends.
All of this was enchanting, but it was a piece of signage that took my breath away. At home in Brooklyn, the library is papered with reminders to “Please keep your voice down.” In contradistinction, the signs at Oodi said, “Please let others work in peace!” The two commands are almost — but meaningfully not — synonymous. The Brooklyn version is a plea for self-control. The Finnish version is a request to acknowledge the existence of other people. You see the difference.
On the top floor were books, games and sheet music from composers like Edvard Grieg and Yanni. There was a second cafe (more salmon soup, pink-domed princess cakes) and glass jars of fresh flowers at every table. Bucida buceras trees grew indoors. Sunshine pressed gently through curved glass walls. Beyond the walls stood the House of Parliament with its mighty gray facade. The Oodi balcony was designed to rest at precisely the same level as the entrance to the House — “to symbolise democracy and dialogue,” according to a library brochure.
Children in stocking feet rolled down a sloping spruce floor as though it were a grassy hill. (Pause to contemplate the farfetchedness of a public library in a major U.S. city that is clean enough for floor-rolling.) Watching them frolic beneath a wavy egg of ceiling I became, once again, very sad. Here was a vision of human flourishing that was simultaneously simple and inconceivable. As a kid in San Francisco, I remember walking into a public library and overhearing a man crack the following joke: “For a homeless shelter, this place sure has a lot of books.”
It would be a mistake not to mention that Oodi performed a shelter function, too. There were people with an unusual volume of possessions using the space as a temperature-controlled sleeping enclosure. It was allowed. The sleepers weren’t confined to any particular section; they were neither avoided nor harassed. If that was a Finn’s idea of the floor, 0 on the Cantril, or close to it, how much did it matter that the ceiling was also, along certain axes, rather low? Did any of these tall thick-haired Finnish people look around their library and think, What my country lacks is Jeff Bezos or the delusion of the opportunity to become him? Perhaps the absence of that thought alone moves you one step up the ladder.
In the course of a text conversation with a friend, I mentioned that I was exceedingly glum. She called and kept calling until I called back, which is what a good friend does, and I rambled about my sorrow at watching the Finnish children rove and play, and told her about how mothers of all ages gathered spontaneously in the library to chat or rest or idly massage their feet. I explained that one of these mothers had placed her baby, a child of no more than 9 months, in a highchair at a library cafe table and handed him a vegetable purée to consider, then left for 20 minutes to fetch books. When she came back we exchanged smiles. She asked where I was visiting from.
“New York,” I said. “I have a little girl about your son’s age.”
“Ah. I haven’t been to New York yet. I would like to go.”
We talked about children and libraries and the relative safety of our nations. “Every few years there’s a crisis where a baby is stolen but then it is returned or found 15 minutes later,” she said, of Finland. “Nothing severe.” Her son finished his purée, and they waved goodbye, off to explore the fairy-tale wall.
Travel has the effect of defamiliarizing one’s home, and there were many things I learned about Finland only by comparing them with the status quo back home. From afar, actions I had considered annoying but unrelated in New York congealed into a Category betraying a mixture of selfishness and cynicism: littering, blocking subway doors, taking up two parking spaces, ignoring a mother struggling to hoist her kid’s stroller up or down a flight of stairs.
People behave antisocially for all kinds of reasons. I could not, in the space of a week, discover why Finns did not rebel against their tiny coffee cups or litter or cut in line or carry out loud cellphone conversations in public places or why there was no visible dog waste although some one in five of them owns a dog. Or why, if a crosswalk light is red, a Finn will wait until the light blinks green to cross, even if there is zero oncoming traffic in either direction.
On and on I complained to my friend on the phone, wretched about the idea that my daughter would never eat vegetables alone in a library or paint northern lights on a fairy-tale wall beneath an indoor tree. “True,” said my friend. “But there are worse places to raise a kid than in the United States.” She was correct. Romania, Kosovo and Estonia among them — at least according to the World Happiness Report. A weeklong fixation on the Cantril Ladder was warping any sense of proportion.
The next day I departed the most life-satisfied country on earth in a Finnair plane that hiccuped queasily until it reached cruising altitude. What awaited me back in New York? First there would be the airport taxi line, a reliable case study in misanthropy. Then a slow journey home on potholed expressways to an apartment with holes in the floor. Medical bills. Day care bills. On the other hand, large coffee cups.
All tourism starts out as “happiness tourism” — there are other words we use when we travel to visit family, conduct business or elude capture — even if it mutates into a voyage of morbid introspection. During that first meeting with Mikko Tirronen, I posed to him the Cantril Ladder question. Like every Finn I would go on to ask, he refused to indulge its premise. “How would I know the answer?” Tirronen said. “I’m only having this one life.” No ladder, no top and no bottom: “There was darkness, now something is happening and I’m confused, and then there will be darkness again.”
Read by Julia Whelan
Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck
Engineered by Jeremy McLennan
Molly Young is a book critic for The Times and a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.
The post My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’ appeared first on New York Times.
