1. I hadn’t realised that today was World Happiness Day until I saw that Gallup’s annual World Happiness Report was published today https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349487/world-happiness-report.aspx Finland is the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row! PDF of full report below and here’s a short (and corporate) introductory video from the CEO of Gallup https://youtu.be/I32TsgpxntA

BUT here’s a dissenting view from Yascha Mounk https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-world-happiness-report-is-a-sham

What I found was worse than I’d imagined. To put it politely, the World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems. To put it bluntly, it is a sham. (…) it turns out that the World Happiness Report is not based on any major research effort; far from measuring how happy people are with some sophisticated mix of indicators, it simply compiles answers to a single question asked to comparatively small samples of people in each country: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. If the top step is 10 and the bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand at the present time?“

2. I’ve always been puzzled as to how Finland’s very high suicide rate could be reconciled with their being the happiest nation in the world. It turns out I’m thirty years off the pace. Finland launched a highly effective national campaign in the 1990s in response to a suicide rate that at that time was indeed three times the European average. Here’s a piece from The Conversation by a team from Leiden and Tampere universities describing that success, Finland managed to halve its suicide rate – here’s how it happened https://theconversation.com/finland-managed-to-halve-its-suicide-rate-heres-how-it-happened-224708

3. Life mimicking fiction in this piece from The Spectator by Damian Thompson, which could almost be a review of the film Conclave, about the current manoeuvring for succession in the Vatican https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/does-china-have-vatican-city-in-its-sights/ (You’ll need to sign up for a free account if you haven’t already done so.)

4. Here’s a piece from Tim Klapdor’s blog, Heart Soul Machine, on our collective addiction to ‘devices’, Being Broken https://heartsoulmachine.com/blog/2025/03-09-being-broken/

In the depths of COVID we turned to technology to connect us and express ourselves. Then to entertain us through the lockdowns. Then to distract us from our disrupted lives. Then we succumbed to the addiction. I think the addiction broke us and turned us into … (looks around) … this.

Thanks to OLDaily for that one.

5. And, finally, from The Library of Congress, the ‘earliest surviving American animated film’, made in 1906 https://youtu.be/wGh6maN4l2I