The 2018 World Happiness Report explores happiness among natives and immigrants.
It shows that when immigrants are happy, the countries are, too.
But if the country is already happy, new immigrants will experience increased happiness.
It shouldn’t undermine happiness in the Nordic countries that there are influx of people born abroad.
There’s also dark side to happiness.
Like in Denmark, one of the biggest epidemics right now is stress and people being sick with stress and having to leave their jobs.
And people outside of Denmark didn’t really understand what that meant, like, “What do you mean stress leave?”
But it might be that expectation to have a work-life balance here that stresses people out.
That you both have to work, but you also have to take care of your family.
You also have to be social with your friends. You also have to, you know, do this self-realization thing, hobbies and traveling.
And there’s so much you have to do in the same amount of hours, where as maybe in New York or other places, you know that you’re going to work to 10 every day so you don’t expect to have the same balance, you know?
It can be hard for outsiders to break into the Nordic cultures. The Danes here such tight-knit friend and family groups.
It’s not very natural for them to just include people, new people into their groups.
It is a little harder to come in from the outside to sort of become part of that group. We’ve had some great Danish friends, some met at work, but it is harder, I think, from that on that side, compared to the UK and the U.S. in terms of developing friendships.
There can be serious side effects to maintaining high levels of happiness.
Within in the States, if you look at the level of life satisfaction satisfaction, the higher the life satisfaction actually also the slightly higher the level of suicide rates.
And the theory here is that it might be more difficult to be unhappy in an otherwise happy society because it creates stronger contrast to how you are feeling if you are surrounded by very happy people.
So Denmark actually used to have really high suicide rate.
So in 1980, we had suicide rate of around 40 per 100,000.
Which was I think some of the highest in the world. Now, fortunately, it’s around 25% of that, so it’s around 10 per 100,000.