Looking for happiness

Rummaging through my desk looking for a document, I found a New York Times article I had printed out and saved. The writer took a trip to Finland in search of happiness, Finland being number one on the World Happiness Report for the past eight years. Taking advantage of that distinction, Finland has built a tourism industry around happiness; Visit Finland more than doubled its visitor count in 2024, to five million from two million in 2022.

The Filipino is usually portrayed as a happy people – always smiling, children laughing even if their toys are a tin can and wooden sticks and their swimming pool a flooded street. But in the 2025 World Happiness Report, the Philippines only ranked 57 out of 147 countries, the fourth happiest in Southeast Asia, behind Singapore (ranked 34), Vietnam (46) and Thailand (49).

We scored 6.107 out of 10, in six key factors: GDP per capital, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and corruption. With those categories, I can see why we didn’t score a lot higher; corruption alone probably dragged us way down.

The happiest are the Nordic countries Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden, despite long winter nights and bitter cold many months of the year. Good governance, good public policies such as free education and universal health care probably contribute to some significant degree to the population’s general happiness. Add to that, as the NYT writer noted, the Finns’ closeness to nature (74 percent of the country is forest, conducive to long walks and their “happiness hackers” even recommend talking to the trees) and to the sauna (there are reportedly three million saunas for a population of 5.5 million). Their ritual of alternating sauna and a plunge in frigid waters (the Baltic is cold even in summer) may also have something to do with their attitude.

We’re sorely lacking in forest cover, and especially in urban areas there is a lack of parks and green spaces, so going out and telling our troubles to a tree may not be so easy. The La Mesa Dam Eco-Park and the Ninoy Aquino Wildlife Park in Quezon City, the Arroceros Park in Manila and even the Greenbelt Park in Makati offer urbanites some respite. But in terms of natural forests, a December 2024 report of the Philippine Statistics Authority put the country’s forest cover at 6.91 million hectares, or just 23.4 percent of our total land area of 29.588 million hectares. Another report showed that back in 1934, we had 17.8 million hectares of forest cover, or 57 percent of total land area. So I guess I’ll have to be content with talking to my rubber tree (ficus elastica) growing happily in a pot on my balcony.

Our free education is a mess of poor planning and anomalies (vouchers for ghost students, for example) and universal health care, although mandated by law, is a bad and often fatal joke. PhilHealth is a colossal, dismal failure; a recent episode of a family member needing hospitalization had PhilHealth contributing less than five percent of hospital expenses, and nothing in terms of laboratory tests, doctors’ fees and medicines.

The ordinary Pinoy asks for so little from the government – and gets even less. So we should just take government out of the happiness equation and find it on our own, even in small ways.

The report found that sharing meals and trusting others are “strong predictors of well-being,” and on that score I think we’re on track. Dining alone is an alien concept for us; “Kain na tayo!” is more than a platitude, it is a gesture of inclusion, an offer of hospitality and an invitation to share. Post election my gang got together for a belated birthday celebration (there is always a birthday to celebrate) and a send-off for one relocating to Mindanao and one going off to Denmark for “apos-tolic” duties; it was a meal rambunctious, loud and long (almost three hours), with protestations of “I’m so full!” merely a prelude to another trip to the buffet table. Needless to say, all the cobwebs and the stresses and negativity of the past weeks were washed away by the halo-halo and affogato.

Results of the recent election brought happiness to some because their candidates pulled major upsets, while they were also happy that other candidates – although survey favorites – lost. The fact that the surveys could get it so wrong is also reason to be happy; now will those “false-sters” get off their high horses?

I got to thinking of happiness and joy and whether they were the same thing. Dictionary definition aside, I see happiness as more dependent on external factors, on whether or not circumstances around you are positive and favorable to a state of happiness.

Joy, on the other hand, is like a wellspring from within, not just a feeling but a state of being, independent of and even in spite of external circumstances.

In the Bible, joy is described as a state of being rooted in faith and a relationship with God, a deep sense of peace and fulfillment (“Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be complete.” John 16:24). Joy can be had even in trials and tribulations (“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds…” James 1:2), hence the admonition to “rejoice in the Lord always” (Philippians 4:4).

So, while I hope you do find happiness, I wish you joy.