11th annual World Happiness Report again names Finland happiest country

....they have one of the higher suicide rates in Europe. (a bit higher than the U.S. rate, FWIW) So we might wonder what the methodology is that seems to place higher value on other realities than "at what rate do our people choose to remain alive when it is their choice?"

The people that don’t kill themselves are quite happy apparently.

Suicide is a significantly more complex than someone making a choice or whether someone is happy. So I wouldn't say there is necessarily a connection between a suicide rate and what is being measured in terms of happiness.

Maybe you mean that although people who kill themselves are unhappy, lots of unhappy people are not killing themselves? I would have to say correlation between suicide and unhappiness is pretty much 1 to 1, though the correlation between unhappiness and suicide, not so much.

I don’t see happiness as a complicated concept. You know when you are and when you aren’t. But you can be unhappy and still be deeply grateful and know you’re blessed, and be joyful. Which is also pretty close to happy, though in a different sense.

…and of course we can be a bunch of things all at the same time!

It is all in how you define unhappiness. There are obviously many cases where people who commit suicide are "unhappy", but there are also many that are the result of impulsive situations. People who commit suicide are in the moment 1) Overwhelming sense of helplessness, 2) Don't see hope in getting out of the situation and 3) Have a sense of worthlessness (people will be better without them). These can drive unhappiness and unhappiness can drive these. Suicidal tendencies for many typically occur in a 5 minute window of time. The vast majority of people who are unhappy do not commit suicide. Not all people who commit suicide are generally unhappy.

For those people who do not struggle with this issue, they see it as someone who is just unhappy or they made a choice, and that is not a nice easy bow that you can tie onto this.

Is that while we might say that a correlation to unhappiness is imperfect at best, the degree to which suicide correlates to unhappiness ought to indicate as well a level of depression that does not result in suicide. That noted, a number of people do lose hope quickly--classic example being the person caught in criminal sexual sin having their sin shown all across the world killing himself the next day.

But really, perhaps the core of what I'm getting at is that there is a substantial difference between the categories of "happy" and "not depressed." One can verify the latter with a visit to a psychologist or psychiatrist (or refute it), but "happy" is a lot more subjective.

And maybe that's why we get these results that seem counterintuitive to us in light of other known facts.