alt Hacker NewsIt’s interesting to see a country’s internal rank of its own happiness against how I would rank them using my worldview.
Israel for example seems like a place that would be fairly unhappy right now given world events, but they rank quite highly.
Saudi Arabia also sticks out as unexpected. It seems in the media I hear about their government being quite oppressive (especially against women), so seeing them just above the US is surprising.
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IMO, everyone on Earth has to reconcile with their current circumstances and make the choice to go about life with a positive or negative disposition in spite of those circumstances.
Perhaps all the Saudi men are very happy.
Do the Saudi Arabia numbers count all of the foreign workers who are brought in to do the dirty jobs for low wages and treated like dogs? Or are only citizens counted?
Another big surprise is Mexico. It seems like every day there's another gory story about a bunch of people disappearing or getting shot in a gang war. But they're the second-highest ranked in North America at #12, behind only Costa Rica.
Israel I think is similar to Costa Rica in that whatever problems Israelis have, they look around at their neighbors and realize how much worse it could be.
It had a huge drop in positive emotions due to the war with Gaza in 2023. Actually, negative emotions were higher than positive which is sad and expected. But the index includes many metrics that don't change rapidly like GDP, life expactancy.. so any short conflict will not have outsized effect.
In Israel they use happiness as a rebellion. You try to kill them, you say what you want, but they don’t care, they stay happy. It fuels their enemy’s rage.
>Israel for example seems like a place that would be fairly unhappy right now given world events, but they rank quite highly.
I'm really confused at how people still believe the narrative that Israel is a weak country that is suffering. They are causing the suffering.