Want Happiness? Be Kind.

Findings from World Happiness Report 2025

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In my last piece, I wrote about the high level of meanness from the person currently occupying the White House, some of his supporters, and a number of right-wing media personalities. It touched a nerve with some of you.

In a synchronistic turn, just as I was finishing the piece, the World Happiness Report 2025 hit my in-box. Beginning in 2012 a small group began working with Gallup to interview people in 150 countries about their level of happiness. The information is then compiled and ranked.

Interestingly, while analyzing the results for 2024, the researchers found that kindness and the belief in the kindness of others is much more closely tied to peoples’ happiness than previously thought. One of the tools they use is the “Lost Wallet” experiment. Survey participants are asked if they believed people in their community would return a wallet they found that belonged to someone else. The researchers also run experiments to see how many lost wallets would indeed be returned. Also interesting is that nearly everywhere people are overly pessimistic and predict the wallet return rate will be half of the percentage of wallets that are actually returned. The countries that ranked as the happiest in the world are also those that believe a high percentage of lost wallets will be returned.

Long-time lost-wallet researcher, John F. Helliwell, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report noted, “The wallet dropping experiments are so convincing because they confirm that people are much happier living where they think people care about each other, even if perceptions are everywhere too pessimistic.”

I’ve been tracking relative happiness for several decades as part of my work advocating for a healthier, saner economic system that is gentler on people and planet than our current extraction and consumption-based version of capitalism. As part of that work I was a researcher with the Global Wellbeing Lab out of MIT. We met with people in Berlin, remote villages in the Amazon, favelas in Rio de Janeiro, and the tiny Himalayan country of Bhutan. Interestingly, one of the constants across all locations was that people reported making a positive contribution to their community was a key to their own wellbeing and happiness.

Some of my take-aways of World Happiness Report 2025: