U.S. hits new low in World Happiness Report

Some years ago I moved back to Finland (#1) after several years in the US (now at #24).

While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question. Finnish people just don’t have high expectations. Every positive development is a welcome surprise.

Americans are primed to want it all and seem to constantly compare themselves against unachievable standards on social media. “The American Dream” is more illusionary than ever. Everybody is a temporarily inconvenienced billionaire. This can be positive when it produces a drive that builds things, but it seems to mostly produce unhappiness right now because it’s so out of balance.

>While the quality of life really is objectively better with children, the secret to these rankings is probably the calibration inherent in the question.

that's not really a secret or calibration issue though, that gets to the core of what happiness is, a relational property between expectation and reality. It's not an objective measure like income or height.

I don't think the notion of an 'objective' quality of life even makes a lot of sense. Quality of life is always measured against some concrete alternative, not against some abstract scale or points based system. Two people are going to have very different attitudes towards some way of life purely depending on what direction they come from.