Happiness: Dictionaries define it as somewhere in the ballpark of “a state of well-being, joy, and contentment.” But those are evasive, fleeting concepts. (And don’t even try to get a handle on defining “bliss.” States one dictionary: “Complete happiness.”)
Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz’s definition was easy to wrap your arms around: Happiness may indeed be a warm puppy.
But what if you’re a cat fancier?
Maybe the best way to explain the conundrum is actually an image: the iconic smiley face drawn by graphic artist Harvey Ball in 1963 — initially designed to raise the flagging morale of office workers at an insurance company. There’s none of the mystery of Mona Lisa’s inscrutable smile here; happiness is indisputably clear in its ear-to-ear beam.
Such unambiguous happiness seems to be what we all want. But how to get there?
Sometimes it seems like the pursuit of happiness is an endless, trying, even fanciful quest — and one destined to leave the devoted searcher stranded far from the hoped-for destination.
In recent years, seeking happiness has itself been codified, analyzed, and scrutinized, giving birth to a science of happiness. We now have the field of positive psychology. We have self-help books by the score. And we have myriad studies seeking to identify the happiest places on Earth with the goal of helping us all find what those happy folk have found.
By some measures, we’re happier than ever — or at least since such data became available. By others, our happiness is lagging with each passing year. (More on both to come.)
But maybe these studies are looking in the wrong places. Or asking the wrong questions.
The Pursuit of the Pursuit of Happiness
To try to get his finger on the pulse of all this, journalist Eric Weiner had a novel idea: He traveled the globe, visiting 10 countries considered more or less “happy” and reporting on what lessons their inhabitants might teach the rest of us. The result was his 2008 book, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, which is a mix of objective and subjective analyses that went on to become a TV series.
Spoiler alert: Weiner found that Bhutan was a supremely happy country; the government even keeps tabs on its people’s Gross National Happiness. The Swiss were also happy, but for different reasons. Moldova? Not so happy. The United States? Somewhere in between.
Unpacking his bags after his journey, Weiner also attempted to unpack his findings: “Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.”
He followed that with the written equivalent of a shrug, admitting happiness is “slippery.” And adding, perhaps most significantly, that there’s more than one path to finding it.
One thing is certain: Weiner’s bestseller popularized a topic and spurred a trend. “I am pleased to see sustained interest in gauging happiness across cultures and countries,” he says. “I think it reflects a growing recognition that happiness is not exclusively an ‘inside job.’ It is also a cultural phenomenon. Some nations are simply better than others at producing happy citizens.”
Happiness Trends
The pursuit of the pursuit of happiness has become a topic of enduring fascination, researched from myriad and various angles — sociological, psychological, economic, philosophical, political, scientific, and more.
Since the 1980s, social scientists at the World Values Survey have accessed surveys of more than 400,000 people from more than 100 nations containing almost 90 percent of the world’s population. The surveys have asked the same two questions: “Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, not at all happy?” And, “All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?”
Economic growth, democratization, and increasing social tolerance have all helped raise happiness levels. And while people from wealthier countries tend to be happier than those from poorer countries, democratization and rising tolerance have more impact than economic growth.
“The results clearly show that the happiest societies are those that allow people the freedom to choose how to live their lives,” explained Ronald Inglehart, PhD, the late founder of the World Values Survey, in 2008.
Not all recent research jibes with those pleasant trends, though. Since 2012, the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre has published an annual World Happiness Report. Over time, the organization has examined different influences and aspects of happiness. For instance, the 2025 report focused on the impact of caring and sharing on people’s well-being in 147 countries.
In 2026, the report was grave. While many countries — especially Scandinavian nations — were content, “in general, most Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010,” the executive summary stated. The culprit? Social media. And, in particular, its effect on the young.
“Life satisfaction is highest at low rates of social media use and lower at higher rates of use,” the authors report. “The rise of internet and social media use has affected well-being directly, and also indirectly by altering trust. . . . Negative emotions are becoming more common in all global regions.” Sadness and worry are on the rise.
What Money Can’t Buy
Money can’t buy happiness, goes the old maxim, but it does seem to lend a helping hand. With that in mind, psychologist Mohsen Joshanloo, PhD, of South Korea’s Keimyung University, crafted a new means of measuring happiness, called wealth-adjusted life satisfaction (WALS), for a 2025 study.
“WALS asks not just ‘how happy is this country?’ but also ‘how happy is this country given its wealth?’” he writes in an article for the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Part of what drives this trend is a broader shift in how we define success and a good life,” he says. “In many parts of the world, material survival is no longer the only concern for large segments of the population. When basic needs related to safety and financial security are relatively met, people begin to focus more on subjective and psychological aspects of life, such as satisfaction, meaning, autonomy, and social relationships.”
By Joshanloo’s WALS measure, Nicaragua is No. 1 in happiness. It’s followed by the usual suspect, Finland, then Kyrgyzstan and Nepal. The United States is No. 32. Wealthy countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain “produce substantial wealth but seem less effective at turning it into subjective well-being,” he writes.
So what trumps wealth in the hunt for happiness?
“Some of the strongest factors associated with higher‑than‑expected life satisfaction in my analysis were perceived job quality (for example, psychological aspects of work, such as autonomy), daily enjoyment, opportunities for forming friendships, personal freedom, and prosocial behaviors, such as volunteering,” says Joshanloo.
“So it is not that wealth becomes irrelevant, but rather that social, cultural, and institutional factors can influence how efficiently that wealth is converted into well‑being.”
The Right Question?
The United States currently ranks middlingly in many happiness quotients. But the fact that Thomas Jefferson included the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right in the Declaration of Independence may reveal a cultural optimism that happiness is indeed possible. Maybe not Harvey Ball’s manic smiley face–level bliss, but life satisfaction. A sense of well-being. Contentment.
And maybe “Are you happy?” is not the right, or at least not the most meaningful, question.
That was one of Weiner’s conclusions: “Maybe love is more important than happiness,” he writes.
“‘Happiness’ doesn’t do justice to what we truly crave,” Weiner says. “Most people, I think, want a meaningful life more than a happy one. Yes, there is some overlap between the two, but it is not 100 percent. You can have a rich and meaningful life and not be happy all the time.”
This article originally appeared as “Happy Places” in the November/December 2026 issue of Experience Life.
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