Happiness may be hard to quantify, but for the data-obsessed, the World Happiness Report is as close as you can get.
The annual report, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, leverages data from Gallup to rank every country in the world by self-reported life satisfaction. For the second year in a row, not a single English-speaking country has cracked the top 10.
The exact reason is tough to pin down, but this year’s lead researchers point out one major factor that could be to blame.
As per usual, Nordic countries dominate the top 10 happiest countries, with Finland claiming the number one spot for the ninth consecutive year. Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are also in the top 10, positioning Northern Europe as the happiest region on the planet. Costa Rica also jumped to the top 5 for the first time, snagging the fourth place spot.
The United States, meanwhile, finds itself in 23rd place. Happiness among those under age 25 in English-speaking and Western European countries has been on a decline over the past decade, with happiness, as ranked on a scale from 0 to 10, dropping by nearly a full point.
While happiness has innumerable contributing factors, the leaders of this year’s World Happiness Report point to one major culprit for declining life satisfaction: overuse of social media.
Social media use is particularly concerning among teenagers, the report said, pointing to a study from the Programme for International Student Assessment that surveyed 15-year-old students across 47 countries. Those who used social media for more than seven hours a day had significantly lower well-being compared to those who used it for less than an hour.
Another study sampled U.S. college students, with the majority saying they wish social media platforms didn’t exist at all, and that they only use them because their peers do.
Blanket internet usage isn’t the culprit, the report says, but the ways in which the internet is used. Some applications of the internet can actually increase happiness, including communications, news, learning, and content creation—though these uses, too, were found to decrease life satisfaction at very high rates of use.
On the flip side, social media, gaming, and browsing for fun are correlated with lower life satisfaction.
But young people who use social media for less than an hour a day have the highest life satisfaction of their demographic, even more than those who don’t use it at all. The data points to moderation as the key to happiness: Social media isn’t inherently a negative factor in life satisfaction, but its widespread overuse is.
“It is clear that we should look as much as possible to put the ‘social’ back into social media,” Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, co-editor of the report, told the Associated Press.
