How happy is your country?

Today marks the 100th post for this blog.
I have to be honest and say that when I started, I did not imagine reaching 50 posts much less a 100.
Blogging has been surprising therapeutic and the practice of putting my thoughts into words has had the added effect for me of ascertaining how I feel about a subject. It has been pretty liberating.

Anyway the question for today is - How happy is your country?

I was browsing the news on the web as I normally do for an hour or so each day when I came across the World Happiness Report (link). The main aim of the report is to provide an alternate measurement of a country's progress as opposed to merely relying on GDP figures. It is in short, a call for governments all over the world to place their citizen's happiness as a prerequisite for any policy.

Sounds pretty intuitive doesn't it but how often have we seen governments come up with some convoluted scheme to boost productivity or economic growth yet failing to place one iota of concern on how it would impact the happiness of the populace. The exception being when it is election time and the happiness of the populace becomes paramount.

On a personal front with migration looming on the horizon, I was interested to see how well my current home measured up against my future home.

The top three countries in the world all hail from Europe. Switzerland is first, followed by Iceland and then Denmark. It struck me that all three aren't large countries.

Rounding out the top 10, we have
Norway in 4th
Canada in 5th
Finland in 6th
Netherlands in 7th
Swededn in 8th
New Zealand in 9th
Australia in 10th
....
USA in 15th
UK in 21st

Singapore?
Singapore is ranked 24th in the World Happiness Report. Pretty remarkable for a small country especially when in 2012, Gallup published a report stating that Singaporeans where the unhappiest and most emotionless people in the world.

Some of our Asian neighbours in the top 50 were,

Thailand at 34th
Taiwan at 38th
Japan at46th
South Korea at 47th


Does this validate our decision to move? No it doesn't.
Does it mean we will be happier in Australia? No it doesn't.
Everyone approaches happiness differently and sometimes it has to hit you between the eyes before you realise how happy you are, how happy you could've been.

We don't know what the future holds but we're surely going to try and if recognizing that we're going to be moving from a country ranked 24th to a country ranked 10th, calms some of our nerves, even better.