Pushkin.

Hey, Happiness Lab listeners, happy International Day of Happiness.

The International Day of Happiness is a holiday established by the United Nations as a global day of recognition about the fundamental importance of human happiness.

And on this day each year, the United Nations and its partners release the World Happiness Report, their annual snapshot of how happy people are around the globe.

The report is also famous for ranking the happiest countries in the world. And this

year, the happiest country is Finland for the ninth year in a row. So congratulations to Finland and

all its lucky inhabitants. For a social science nerd like me, the World Happiness Report is an

absolute tree. It brings leading researchers around the world together to dig into the political, social,

and economic forces that shape our well-being.

Each new edition of the World Happiness Report centers around a different theme.

And this year's theme feels especially relevant.

If we're going to think about psychological well-being and happiness in the modern age,

we have to look in depth at technology.

This is Dr. Gene Twenge, one of the researchers behind this year's World Happiness Report.

Gene is an internationally celebrated psychologist at San Diego State University.

Her chapter looks at how young people around the world use and respond to

social media. Jane is something of a rock star when it comes to understanding teens and technology.

In fact, she was one of the first people to sound the alarm on how smartphones might be damaging

adolescent mental health. The article in the Atlantic was an excerpt of my book, IGen, which came out in August 2017.

It was headline, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation.

As you can imagine, people had some very strong reactions to this title.

I always like to point out, number one, it's a question.

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