Happy New Year!
Hi, and happy New Year! It's Veronika again, and I'm excited to welcome 2026 with the first Weekly Chart of the year — this time, with a reflection on happiness!
As the world steps into another year, we may find ourselves reflecting on the past and looking ahead into the future. Most of us will at one point or another say the well-worn words and wish someone a happy New Year!
We all wish for happiness, for ourselves and our loved ones. But while happiness is an elusive and highly subjective concept, where we live plays a big role in how happy we are likely to be.
Social scientists and statisticians have come up with different ways to measure happiness and what constitutes a good life over the years. While no method is perfect, the Cantril ladder approach used by the World Happiness Report goes to the source and asks respondents around the world to evaluate their life on a scale from 0 (worst possible) to 10 (best possible). And the results? Unsurprising but still striking:
Northern Europe tops the list, as it usually does in most measures of wellbeing, with the three happiest countries being Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.
North America and Australia (as grouped by the World Happiness Report) are the highest scoring region on average. It is also the wealthiest, in terms of GDP per capita.
Costa Rica is a positive outlier, famous for its overall happiness and quality of life, scoring well above its regional peers.
On the other hand, Ukraine scores lowest in Europe and Afghanistan in the world, due to the harsh realities of conflict, instability, and a dire humanitarian situation.
(I'd like to point out here that the horizontal axis showing GDP per capita uses a logarithmic scale for the sake of visual clarity, so what may seem as linear differences are in fact multiplications that set even close neighbors apart by orders of magnitude.)
Wherever in the world and on the chart above you are, let's take a moment in this new year to appreciate what we have and how we can best share our luck with others. Happiness may be a state of mind, but it's good to remember that we're all starting from very different positions, often caused by nothing other than coincidence.
So, here's to a happy New Year, after all. May 2026 be happy as can be!
In the words of Downton Abbey's dynamic duo:
"It makes me smile! The way every year we drink to the future, whatever it may bring."
"What else can we drink to? We're going forward into the future, not back into the past!" — Violet and Isobel, Downton Abbey
Thank you for reading! Next week, I'll be passing the Weekly Chart baton to our visualization developer Elliot.
