Well, not me confined to the tent because the rain has been hammering it down most of the day here. We even had thunder.

But for those that didn’t catch my recent non-journey post for the Hot or Cool Institute, it’s probably not Finland where the happiest people live, much as many of us have come to believe over the years. They don’t smile and laugh very much there…

You can read the full post here, but a quick summary is that the type of happiness that the Finns do well at isn’t happiness as most people will understand it.

Asked whether they smiled or laughed a lot the previous day, Finns rank only 55th in the world. They rank 57th on the question of whether they enjoyed themselves in the previous day.

It is Latin American countries that do the best in this type of happiness. When we incorporate the smiling and laughing type of happiness into our consideration of happiness (combining it with the one that the Finns do well at), then things change in the classic happiness league tables we heat about each year.

Finland drop to 6th, Iceland is now 1st. But interestingly countries such as Guatemala, Czech Republic, Panama, and Uruguay, now find themselves in the top ten. See table 1 below. But see the original blog post for more and an additional discussion about sustainability.

***This is based on an idea I advanced in chapter 7 of my book – A Journey for Happiness: The Man Who Cycled to Bhutan – although currently I’m walking about the UK trying to find happiness here. That is when I’m not stuck in my tent avoiding the rain and trying to not to be too miserable about that.