Welcome to Episode 204 of Live Happy Now.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, thanking you for joining us again this week.

Now, if you've wondered what's up with the state of happiness these days, you're in luck.

Today, I'm talking with Live Happy editor Chris Libby about the annual World Happiness Report.

Each year, the United Nations

Sustainable Development Solutions Network releases a comprehensive world happiness report to look at

happiness from a global perspective. The news isn't exactly great for the U.S. this year.

So Chris and I sat down to talk about what's causing us to be less happy than we should be and what we can do about it.

Well, Chris, it's always fun to sit down and talk with you for a podcast.

Thanks for joining me today.

Well, thanks for having me.

Well, you're such a great person to talk to this because today we are talking about the World Happiness Report, which is something you and I have been reading every year for a few years now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it just came out. It had a lot of great things to say, but it also had some not-so-great things to say about the United States in our state of happiness right now. Yeah, it's according to this happiness report, we are not so happy. We have slipped from

18th to 19th in the world and it's been a steady decline since about 2010. Yeah, we've never

cracked the top 10 since they began doing this report, which was that 2012, I think, that they

started published. Yeah. And typically it's those Nordic countries that are always going to be in those top

10 areas like Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Sweden. They usually kind of, they usually crowd

up the top 10 right there. Yeah, they push us out of the lane there. But why is it? You mentioned we have been declining since 2010. What's up with that?

Well, it's, it is kind of mind-boggling since those Nordic countries, they have lower GDP, they have

higher taxes, they have, uh, uh, it's a lot different from the United States, but they're a lot happier.

Um, we have an improved economy. Our crime is low. We have from the United States, but they're a lot happier. We have an improved economy.

Our crime is low.

We have low unemployment right now, but Americans are still just not as happy as we were.

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