What percentage of the population is happy?

“Good question”, as the saying goes these days, but what do we mean by happiness? According to some “experts”, happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. 

More generally, happiness is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction and is discernible when we experience more positive feelings than negative. Add to that a topic that is incredibly subjective to the point that you might no feel happy if you were me and vice-versa. 

This said, yesterday, I heard on French radio that 80% of that citizens of that country were “happy”. This is good. 

Yet when I look at the OECD table summarizing our respective level of happiness, I see that France is ranked behind the USA and that Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway.

The latter being the number! What’s the OECD country trailing them all? South Africa. 

So now, you’ve got it. When I have a great day I feel like a Norwegian and when things are bad, or after I got my Covid booster shot, I fell worst than a South African!